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Why and How We Study Philosophy
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Comprehensive thinking (out of which all thinking comes), as you see now, has certain things in common with the number one. You can see how the idea of the whole was made by our possibility to think comprehensively and how out of that we made and created the symbol and the metaphor also--which has the possibility to take into its own meaning a set of different meanings and to unite them. This procedure of integrating has also developed out of the tool of comprehensive thinking. Philosophy thinks in speculative concepts that have tried to integrate for so long that the meaning of being and the integration of being seem to be one. Comprehensive thinking builds the tools of thought of all the other creative capabilities of man with only parts of each of the others parallel to it, nourishing and nourished by the parts. This is why Plato could use myth ironically. He used the metaphor consciously in order to help the concept in question, relating metaphorical thinking to the concept in order to make it clearer. He also used symbols in pure philosophy, and although he was quite mistaken about science (believing that numbers were original ideas, mythical entities, the very essence of ideas), he used numbers in order to make the concepts clearer as he also used metaphors.

We now have to drop politics and erotics here because they would enlarge the inquiry too much. We will use art and science mainly and take in religion occasionally in order to see if religious thinking is something in itself that can be brought into its pure form. But mainly we will try to see how speculative thinking is related to metaphorical thinking.

If philosophy should be the only possibility of our time to get the balance of the human mind back, and if philosophy should also be a necessity for everybody to set himself straight in order to get the possibility to relate all capabilities in him personally in the right way so that he has a chance to get on the way of being a whole human being--if all that is so and should be so, then everybody in tbis course should try to think over what he himself has always felt to be his main capability in a creative way and then go on to ask first merely a psychological question by the means of inner questioning? How did I personally become interested in philosophy at all--let alone in the question of how and why should man philosophize? what originally caused my own interest in philosophy? where did I get an interest to look into it at all? This objective question is very important (whether you might be ready to tell me about it or not) and I ask and insist that you think about it because it might mean that you would be able to get your personal approach and find the point where you might best get into philosophy--because we also have to raise the question of how to study philosophy best. We have to find out where everybody can start best; we have to find out who would be his philosopher to start with in order to get the best results for what he is looking for in his own particular field. For those engaged in a definite creative line this answer would not be too painful, but it would be general; so they must also ask: When was the specific moment when I was most interested in a philosophical answer? For those not engaged in a particular activity it will be more difficult, but they should ask:--When has there been an experience which caused me to raise the question I asked when I was a child? why? when wasn't I satisfied with how and what? when did I ask: why did that have to happen to me? I put this in a most primitive way, but even so it is already a philosophical question. Now when I speak of your telling me about your answers--and certainly everyone is entitled to refuse to give an answer--please do not think that I am interested in psychological revelations of your personality. A philosopher is not a confessor. I only ask that everyone thinks about the answer to this question, and if he does, I am perfectly satisfied. But if the answers are such that they can be given, please do this by all means.

Lecture VII

We hear a great deal these days about peace of mind and when it reaches the point where an American rabbi--and not even a second or third-rate one at that--writes a shallow book on peace of mind that becomes a best seller, it would seem that it is time to ask a few questions—both of the real religious thinker and the philosopher. But if we assume for the moment that peace of mind might now be the answer of religion, don't we then have to ask: Doesn't the peace of mind of religion preclude the mind of peace of philosophy? In peace of mind it is something to be given; in a mind of peace it is something to be achieved: to set the mind on a creative line of thinking where it is in a state for peace. This is not the satisfaction of making one's peace with God, but it may possibly be a better way of serving God--if God exists. So these are two absolutely different points of view.

The religious approach proceeds by statements with nothing else in their content but tyrannical means--means which can be tyrannical to achieve our goodness. If for a moment we do not consider them to be revelation, then it means that the statements of religious thinking, put forth as statements to tell us how to be good, contain the pretension that they know and know better than we how to act good. This is the character of a statement and a religious statement, as a statement, has a quality in common with a scientific statement. The scientific statement states a so-called objective truth: this is so and so, and if ycu will repeat the experiment, it will show you that it is so. If some character or part of the scientific statement is applied to human affairs and pretends to know what is necessary, then we can only draw the conclusion that we have to do so and so--as the religious statement also implies. But there is a difference. The scientific statement when applied to human affairs, where it cannot be applied, is absolutely tyrannical--more than tyrannical: it is totalitarian. In it is involved a categorical imperative which runs: You must do that because this is an objective truth; in such and such a historical situation (to use one example) you can only do this; therefore, you must because if you don't, you are just a dope. This "you must" is a totalitarian imperative.

The religious imperative also seems to have a "you must." It makes a statement that God has revealed that you shall act such and such—Here are the ten commandments (and they are commands)! But is a categorical imperative that is a "you must" really involved here? Is it a proposition of the absolute destruction of the freedom of the human mind as a scientific statement is? It is a categorical imperative of "you shall." And what is implied by "you shall"? For one thing, it contains a certain amount of freedom: you can be a sinner--which is a very different proposition from being stupid. Human beings are only afraid of one thing: being a dope--and it is the most frightening thing in the world. To be a sinner may mean eventually to go to hell, but for one thing hell is far away and for another a certain pride is involved in being a sinner. A sinner is defying God--the highest power in the world (as long as He is a personal God with justice)--and to take the part of the Devil makes a man interesting. The figure of Satan in "Paradise Lost" is the most interesting of all the characters; "Paradise Regained" is boring. The characters there are not as interesting as Lucifer, who out of his own strength of will defies God. Your soul may be lost in eternity, but if you are ready to suffer that, it is still a big chance. To be a dope just means to be abolished from the memory of man. So the statement of the scientist is totalitarian. It means that if you do not do what you must do, you will just be out for good. You will be forgotten and nothing--and they have shown us just how well a man can be forgotten in the concentration camps or when a man disappears in a totalitarian country. The usual answer to any inquiry about him is: "Whom are you talking about? Such a man never existed." This is what Hannah Arendt calls "the hole of oblivion.”

How terrible the threat of oblivion is was once shown in the hebrew religion. They tried once to make such a threat--that a man could be blotted out of the book of the living--and this was a much more terrible proposition than the Christian hell--eternal pain or not. The soul must be able to endure the pain or it would die--it might even get used to it or even enjoy it. But to be blotted out of the book of the living!--that was a much bigger threat. Even so, this threat of the Hebrews was not a totalitarian threat; it was still not the misapplied threat of science of "the hole of oblivion," of being a dope, of being nothing. In the Hebrew sense it meant only to be blotted out in the living performance of theological history. It meant that you had not done anything for carrying out the great task of humanity that had been given to man by God? to unite humanity under one divine faith and one law. You had refused to carry on that one great task and therefore you had no right to be included with those who lived on through their children. You just did not belong. This was also the same threat the Greeks had. It was better for Achilles to accept the proposition to become a hero and to die young--though the Greeks loved life dearly. (They loved it more than the Hebrews loved life, and the Hebrews loved life more than the Christians. There was a saying during the war, "Let's hope he's a Jewish doctor."--which meant: Let's not take a Christian doctor who believes in the immortality of the soul.) The Greeks loved life because they did not believe in going on in eternity in this unfolding book of the living. The Greeks clung to life much harder because they all had to go to Hades--which was a most terrifying proposition. Achilles knew he would say later in Hades, "I would rather be a poor man’s servant, and alive, than be a hero and in Hades." But still he made the decision to die young as a hero because to the Greeks glory was their life. To go into tradition, to be sung about--that was their hope and idea of eternity. The Greek threat would have been: you will not go into glory. The drunken companion of Odysseus who fell off a roof was condemned not to live on in glory but only to go to Hades.

But while religious thinking is only tyrannical and not totalitarian, leaving a small spot of freedom, and while it only puts forth a proposition of "you shall" rather than "you must", you do not have the creative decision in religion to say: "I think that this is still more good and this I will try to make." This decision is only possible in philosophy--which goes on an entirely non-tyrannical proposition. Philosophy--free philosophy--makes propositions, not statements and looks for agreement and cooperation in bringing about this specific good or avoiding that specific bad without pretending to know what is good or bad. It only asks, What is more meaningful? and then says: "I think I propose the more meaningful, and if you agree that it is more meaningful and if you agree with the part of the proposition that is a statement (that the situation seems to be thus and thus), then let's proceed to try to establish what I propose and you agree to." Philosophy asks: Do you agree? In a philosophical proposition one must be able to discern the two parts: the part that is a statement, which must be checked objectively (the part that says: These are the elements of the situation speaking for that evaluation of the situation.) and the part that is the proposition. This means that philosophy has never existed in this sense because no philosopher has ever put forth propositions in this sense--including the nihilistic ones, and they last of all because they tried to handle scientific statements philosophically (like Hegel) saying in effect: "I am in possession of the absolute truth without the revelation of God." But revelation only claimed to be the essential truth--there was still space left where people could act creatively. The pseudo-philosophers and pseudo-scientists have excluded that entirely. Everything is known and must now only be learned. There is the "you must."

Philosophy started with the Greeks and developed by trying to establish an independent line of thinking. But if it became possible, as it did during the Middle Ages, for example, to call philosophy the handmaiden of theology, we have to ask: how has that even been possible? Old philosophy had to take in other methods of thinking: metaphorical thinking (art), symbolic thinking (science), and religious thinking (which proceeds according to revealed truth). And though independent philosophy (which is not the sane as free or pure philosophy) tried to remain apart from theological thinking, it never really made distinctions between philosophical thinking and religious thinking. Philosophy asks for the meaning of being; it asks: What is being? The religious man asks about being insofar as he asks: What is good? Beginning with the Greeks, philosophers tried to establish what the meaning of being was, but they never could because of the term "being" which was also a mythical term. They never could make out what they meant because they thought that they knew--and how? By revelation, by a belief with which they started: a belief in the cosmos. The cosmos was what they thought of when they asked: What is being? They had, so to speak, a prejudiced mind. They took over a religious proposition--though it was not a theological proposition because the Greeks did not have a theology. They did not have such a God as the Jews and Christians. With such a God-Creator one could try to find out what being was by realizing God's will--and it was possible to base the whole science of theology on that presumption. Men had only with the Hebrews to study the texts, or with the Christians to study the development of the church, and they were on the way to discovering the meaning of being because God had made it. The Greek way could never become theological because there was no God-Creator, but it was cosmological. There was a cosmos with the divinities and Gods contained within it, and possible transcendence was made within the world. To man, who was also within the cosmos, the Gods were beings to whom man could transcend, to whom he could go to increase his abilities (the Gods were immortal, for example), but the original proposition was that the original being of everything was in this cosmos and this cosmos had always been there. This was the assumption of all philosophy, and all philosophy up to 1800 developed along the lines of this cosmological concept. When philosophers were talking about being, they were sure they knew what they were talking about. They thought that they had to be scientists in the way of observing the cosmos (as the religious men had to observe God, so to speak), that they had to observe the goings on in the cosmos and from that to relate each event to every other event, making a system, and to say with that system: "The full truth is here. We must have the truth here because we have analyzed being--a thing that is known since the cosmos can be studied by observation."

With Kant (and the breakdown of the cosmological and theological approach) the possibility of free philosophy started, but what we got instead was totalitarian philosophy. Not that Marx was a Bolshevist or Nietzsche or Hegel were Nazis, but metaphysically they took the idea that they knew being was the universe--and now a universe not including God or transcendent powers. That meant there was no longer a difference between philosophy and science, and the consequence was that this pseudo-philosophy had to dissolve into science because it used the same procedures as science used. Hegel created logic as a science. He thought it was metaphysics but it was a pseudo-metaphysics that made it possible to make logic a science. Symbolic logic is the science of scientific methods--but the people who do that do not call themselves scientists; they call themselves philosophers (which started with Dewey). They forget that they have nothing to do with metaphysics. But that they could call themselves philosophers, and did, was because philosophers like Hegel were only pretenders. So the scientists could take over philosophy and could claim it for themselves, and rightly so.

This is why philosophy has ceased to be--except for the existential philosophy, which seems to be concerned with the metaphysical. But it has one great weakness: it proceeds on scientific methods along psychological lines and the existentialists' real results have been taken over by the psychologists, checked scientifically, and have fallen under that field of science. Freud was able to take over Nietzsche's concept of sublimation which with Nietzsche was still metaphysical, but since it was existential (relating to inner human experience), psychology could take it over, check it, and use it--and rightly so, because philosophy had narrowed itself down to one part of the physical (here the inner process of man's inner experience which is really physical). As soon as something physical is taken to be metaphysical, it will fall prey to science because science can rightly say: "We can do that better." The services philosophy has rendered to science are tremendous, but it is being sucked up by science. On the one side there is psychology (there only remain certain existential propositions not gotten by psychology--and very few propositions at that) and on the other side, symbolic logic. It seems that we have finished this development of science out of the very body of philosophy, that philosophy has done what it could do, and has given up its task to the sciences. But this is not true. Philosophy has only abandoned its task and it is a task that cannot be replaced. The moment after Kant, when the pseudo-philosophers started to think in pseudo-scientific lines, the back of philosophy was broken and philosophy started to fall prey to the scientist. Philosophy had its moment to come into its own with Kant and lost it.

Once before philosophy had made a try to come into its very own--and that was with Socrates. Though we do not know enough about it, as far as we can find out historically and from seeing the contradictions in Plato where the thought of Socrates does not seem to fit the thought of Plato, we find out that Socrates seemed not to be concerned with the cosmos or being. He seemed to be concerned only with the phenomenon of the human being, with the philosophy of men only, and he did not pretend to have a possibility to say anything about what being might be. He was a thinker who tried to proceed from the thing he knew best--and that was Socrates himself insofar as he was a human being. He then tried to proceed to other human beings and to find other asserted proofs that way. But the way of Socrates was left entirely until Kant made the same approach--though in a different way. Kant was critical about God and the cosmos, and tried to find out how a philosopher could go on without making an assumption of the cosmos. Kant showed how we run into antinomies permanently as soon as we start with a concept of the whole, and that we also run into contradictions as soon as we start with God, so he tried for the first time to return to the small platform of Socrates:--Let's first ask and try to find out: how is the human mind? what can man do? what is reason? what are the limits of reason? how does man reason? He tried there to find a line for free philosophy apart from the cosmos and theology. Then immediately after Kant the cosmological approach and the theological approach were secularized and synthesized by Hegel and we proceeded in the nihilistic way. With that philosophy went down to the bottom and ceased to be.

Now we make a new approach again to philosophy, not only to show that philosophy is a human creative ability with its own source, methods, and tasks which cannot be replaced by any other human capability of thinking, but that it is also the center of all other creative abilities of thinking. We want to show that religious, artistic, scientific and political thinking all derive from philosophical thinking and that without it they will not be able to come into their own; that without this capability of philosophy to become pure philosophy, they cannot become pure art, pure science, or pure politics, and that even religion will never become pure religion--whatever that might be (It might be that religion will be able to do without mythical thinking and get a living idea of God.)--or can never come into its own without philosophy. But right now we are only concerned with getting certain fundamental indications of all these different capabilities of man's thinking (and thinking is doing--not only the beginning, but the very procedure of doing itself) on all these different lines. We are concerned with distinguishing these lines in order to answer our question, which in this course is: What is philosophy? can pure philosophy exist? and if so, how and why? and if it does exist, why must man philosophize?

Jaspers in his book ("Way to Wisdom") tries to show that philosophy still has a genuine right of existence and tries to show this in the inner existence of man--that philosophy should be and can be something that formerly religion has been: something to live by. But replacing God (who is the only possible being man could live by) by a sleight-of-hand with philosophy is something that can only be done in a situation of despair. Philosophically, we have to reject it, and have to say: "This is one of the greatest documents in our situation of human need and despair and that you want to help us (which he does by distinguishing what science is--and this is the most valuable part of the book) we fully acknowledge, but other than the contribution about science we have to say: 'We cannot take it--because isn't it consolation?' If we want consolation in our despair, let's go back to religion, but don't give us a substitute. We cannot take the God of philosophy as a living God because this would be a substitute. Our souls can only be satisfied with butter; do not give us oleomargerine."

Camus tries the same thing in the atheistic way. He tries to show us that we can get out of the nihilistic situation by replacing religion with a kind of brotherhood of man. He sells a new thing, so to speak: pure ethics developed out of a state of rebellion. But then we have to say: "If you want to offer Christian brotherhood again, please offer it; but don't give it another name." If it is true, however, that we can only get out of this situation of human despair, this meaninglessness, this nothingness, this explosion of our very capabilities by pretending to believe in God and a religious proposition, then let's take the God of our fathers. Let the Jew go back to his God and the Christian back to his God. Let's all go back, but let's not take propositions of philosophers who are in despair and who say, "Here is another thing as good as Christian brotherhood.", and when we look, we see it is the same; or propositions that try to replace a living God with an idea of God.

Jaspers says that philosophy has the task now to save us, but we do not want to be saved--and if we do, we will trust God to do it. The philosopher should not try--even as softly and gently as Jaspers does by saying that philosophy can only give us assurance of our own inner being. Such humility as this we cannot accept--because the philosopher can say, and can show that it is so, that we have to philosophize because it is the only way of freedom. Philosophy itself is committed to its very performance and everyone has also to commit himself to it to get the strength of his mind together. If philosophy is only a kind of consolation tolerated by science, it still is not out of the role of a hand-maiden--though it might have advanced into the nursery as a nurse-maid. Pure philosophy puts forward a very committing proposition; it says: "Without me you can never be free and can never really transcend yourself. You will fall prey to any scientific statement put forward. You will lose your freedom entirely or you will go back to religion and get a little part of freedom. I, philosophy, am the only capability of yourself that can make you free." That is the claim that free philosophy puts forward and it says along with it that everybody has to work and to live philosophically if he wants to live the life of a free human being--in fact, if he wants to become a human being at all because only a free being is a human being. So we have the possibility of mere existence, ruled by inhuman forces, or existence with a certain possibibty of inner life in religion, or we have the possibility of changing our existence constantly toward and finally into a full, free human life by philosophy. That is the choice that philosophy, when it comes into its own, puts to man.

Jaspers' book helps very much. It shows all the elements of confusion in the situation that the human mind finds itself, and it tries to find a solution in the most noble way; and if Jaspers has not come to my position, it might well be because he is such a sweet human being. Being a liberal to the bone, he would never think there could be such a thing as an absolute necessity of commitment to freedom--that as to freedom there is no choice, that as to freedom there is no freedom. We have the freedom to reject freedom, but the price is that we lose ourselves completely in the nihilistic situation and no one aware of the price would be willing to pay it. So even this choice is not really there. We are forced into freedom by the very situation of our life and it is a question of life or death. The only choice so far as man is concerned is that he can choose death--and in that sense, he is free as well in regard to freedom--but he has to be aware of it. But such a choice as between good and evil (as in religion) or betheen beauty and ugliness (as in art) is not left to man here because the choice between life and death is not a real choice as soon as he becomes aware of it. He can give an absolute protest against freedom, but he must know that with this he condemns himself to mental death and all humanity to death. If he does know this and makes that choice, he is a demon; he is someone who acts compulsively without it having any meaning and more than that: he is acting consciously against meaning.

In the nihilistic situation in totalitarianism we have acted more or less consciously against meaning because totalitarianism has to do with the will to meaninglessness and that means the will to death. Metaphysical death means absolute meaninglessness. We can decide for absolute meaninglessness but that means to decide against life and this choice cannot be given to everyone to the full. Why? Suppose you choose the nihilistic trend. Can I now give that choice to you really? NoJ because you are in that same moment intent upon becoming a murderer and will become a murderer, and I, knowing that I have made the other choice (the choice for life by my own choice for freedom), can never accept murder; I cannot by my very acceptance of freedom in essence--because by the choice for life, I have excluded myself from ever being able to choose murder. This decision made without God is quite different from the religious proposition, which makes no assumption of my own creative choice, because as soon as I consciously make that choice I have to exclude every opposite of freedom--and that means murder. So I can only give you that choice theoretically because if I know that you have made the other choice (a real conscious choice in freedom against freedom and by that a choice against life and for murder), then I must be absolutely opposed to you. And with this comes the possibility of an absolute division between human beings--a division between those who decide for the line of meaningfulness and the others who have decided to follow the falling curve of given accidents into absolute meaninglessness. Between man and demon no understanding is possible. Here are the races of Cain and Abel and we can see here what thet myth might really mean and how deep it might really go--having reached in free human thought this very possibility of human life. Man, having smelled by the power of myth, unclearly but very deeply, that such a possibility is within man, has now established it.

If we know how to think on pure, critical philosophic lines, we will find out that the myths are even deeper than we thought before, and this is what binds them to philosophy. Philosophy has a very curious ability: it always binds the past to the future because quality counts. This living development is never found in science--where we reject as unimportant steps that have outlived their usefulness, so to speak (the discovery of Galileo, for example, is only interesting historically now)--but a new philosophical discovery makes a certain element of mythical philosophical thinking even deeper and more valuable. It adds new qualities and shows us that the past too becomes deeper--as the myth of Cain and Abel has a deeper meaning for us now or as it seemed when Kant got his idea of transcendence, making it appear that the ideas of Plato had been misinterpreted up to then. This is true of art too. If Cezanne had not painted, we would never have been able to enjoy El Greco so much. He was enhanced in value by Cezanne because there were elements in El Greco that could only be discovered after they had grown in Cezanne and taken on a new shape—then they suddenly blossomed out before our eyes. But Cezanne had to invent a higher state of that embryo all by himself before we saw the same embryonic element that was already there in El Greco. There seems to be a strange continuity of development of the human mind. All those propositions seem to have been there in a mythical state, but not in a way we could consciously develop. Everything seems to have always been there in myth and grasped--though not in a clear way. But this also means that the man who lived in the time of early myth was able to grasp the same essence we are able to grasp--which is very good because he need not then regret that he lived a thousand or so years ago instead of now.

Lecture VIII

Now we have to find out what the difference between philosophy and religion really is. Philosophy seems to have destroyed religion absolutely after the performance of Kant. It has been proved, it seems, that man can either be a philosopher or a religious man--and so eternal enmity seens to have been set between the two. But this was not Kant's intention--on the contrary, Kant wanted to prepare the jump. he wanted us to become aware that we cannot know anything about God, that we cannot even know whether He exists or not (though we hove to always keep the possibility of the existence of God in mind as a limitation of human reason), but he also thought there might be another realm which. transcends reason: we might be transcendent being's and might be able in full consciousness to transcend our reason, to transgress, so to speak, into the unknown. Kant meant that we can only do this by belief: "I want to find out what can be known and what cannot be known by man in order to make place for belief." Fe wanted to make place for belief, for the unknown realm (which means there would be an opportunity for us to start believing because it is an unknown realm) and in order to do this, he wanted to teach the limits of reason.

But this is a very humiliating thing--this limit of man's reason. Besides, we do not have to just take this limitation--we can try the other possible thing and transcend our own reason and believe against our reason. Men have the power to do this and it is a very seducing proposition. This proposition was made already when the first church fathers were still very uneducated men and up against the Greek philosophers who, of course, were very educated men. They could only help themselves by saying reason was a whore (as Luther later said: "Reason is a whore who condemns you to hell."). Tertullian thought that belief could only be gained against reason and said: "Christ has been born into the world, has been crucified and has been resurrected. I believe because it is silly." This is a strange formulation of belief against reason--"because it is silly"—and Tertullian meant: I believe because it is silly because reason is a very little thing of man that can never lead him to faith and it can never make him happy.

The philosopher's quest after truth contains one risk: he might become unhappy. The quest of religion after bliss, goodness and happiness means that the religious man runs the risk of being a liar. This is the antinomy of the two approaches. The philosopher runs the risk of unhappiness, caring for truth and relying on his own freedom if he can realize it by reason (which can now be done after Kant). But in this quest for freedom of the philosopher the religious man sees the hellish pride of man--man who thinks he can do it by himself by the means of his reason as his highest force--and the religious man says, "If you do it, you will be condemned to hell--or if not that, at least you will run the risk of unhappiness. You will never have peace of mind." The philosopher replies, "As for hell, I don't even believe in it, and to hell with peace of mind. If I can only achieve out of freedom and by acting in free decision to bring out a mind that achieves peace, I can die having been unhappy all my life." The religious man then tells him, "Then you want to be a hero.", and the philosopher answers, "Maybe, but I don't want to be a saint as you do." And so the argument stands. Religion can make the one man happy but without self-confidence perhaps, and philosophy gives the other self-confidence but makes him unhappy perhaps.

With two such different positions there must be two different starting points and two different methods for these two kinds of thinking--religious end philosophical thinking. It has been doubted by philosophers after Kant that there was such a thing as genuine religious thinking and it was thought that it was merely a misunderstanding of philosophical thinking, that it was only to take something for granted and to go on deducing from that. That much is true (this proceeding from a basic assumption), but there is also a different starting point, a certain creativeness of its own to religious thinking--which could well mean that if man misses it entirely and throws it out, it might be a reason to make him unnecessarily unhappy. Philosophy has to be concerned about this because it involves an act of freedom. If I do something against myself I have to account for it. If I take the risk of unhappiness, that's fine; but if I, as a philosopher, neglect one of the genuine approaches of human thinking, that could mean that I dismember myself of a very necessary creative capability. We could say to the philosopher here: "Don't talk too much about your right to be unhappy without religion because without religious thinking you might cripple yourself." So we must ask: Is there such a genuine approach to God that is necessary for man and that he should pursue? We have seen that since Kant proved we cannot know whether God exists or whether He does not exist that we must keep the question of the possibility of the existence of God always in mind and account for it; otherwise the philosophic work will be marred for it means we then make an unspoken statement of the non-existence of God. Most philosophical thinkers do not take the question into account and this is a very big fault in philosophical thinking. The philosopher who tries to keep out of the question does not say, as the atheist does, "I do not believe that God exists.", but if in his philosophical work he does not take the question into account it means that he takes the position of the atheist whether he wants to or not (he might even believe in God). And here the riddle of religious thinking lies.

In philosophical thinking, if we want to proceed really philosophically, we have to take into account all the other lines of thinking—religious as well as scientific thinking, artistic thinking, etc. --and by the same token, if we want to find out about the other lines of thinking, we have to find out what philosophical thinking is too. Now if we proceed with the negative statement of Kant that we cannot know whether God exists or not, we arrive at a positive statement that has never been made in philosophy: the statement that God is always possible and remains possible and therefore we have always to keep that possibility in mind. And if the existence of God remains possible--and that is the irrefutable conclusion from this position of Kant--then this positive statement implied in the negative statement of Kant means (and we are speaking metaphysically now) that the deepest reason for man's believing in God for so many thousands of years is that even if man had tried consciously to get rid of the idea of God (which, of course, he did not) and had proceeded then as far as we have now since Kant, he still could not have gotten the idea of God out of his mind. If man cannot--and we know that now (we know that there is the eternal possibility of the existence of God)--then philosophy is bound to look constantly into this line of thinking that has tried to find (and then discovered) one concept of God after another until it finally boiled down to one being who created the world. This concept of the God-Creator is one concept we cannot overcome.

Man has always tried to make conceptions of God and since philosophy cannot refute the abstract idea of God, this binds us to look at this trend of research, so to speak, which has gone on (to the philosopher's way of thinking) merely in the imagination by building up one concept of God after another in free space without anything to go on. What kind of thinking of man makes possible such an absolute imagination? Even the artistic imagination is not absolute. Although it transforms things by being given images and making them into things of ourselves--which is one of the highest abilities of man--we cannot call that absolute imagination. Absolute imagination is the ability to imagine something without any hint--and there seems to be such an ability of man, such a quality of thinking in empty space, in very nothingness for otherwise there could be no religious thinking. This is the hardest thing to crack--to come to this hidden ability of man. We have either to prove that it is self-deception and merely reflective thinking--in which case we then could say that religious thinking does not concern us and we have nothing to learn from religious thinking so long as we still keep the idea of God in mind--or we have to take it into account and have to try to find out if it has a certain creativeness of its own. If religious thinking is a genuine creative ability of man, then we have to find out whether religious thinking is like all other thinking--a derivate of comprehensive thinking (which means we would then have the perfect idea of a system of human creative thinking--a system where all the creative abilities of the human mind always relate back to the center of all those trends of creative thinking? comprehensive thinking)--or whether religious thinking might not be the real center (as it was until 1800) and comprehensive thinking an impossibility without religious thinking.

Philosophically, we e.oubt that religious thinking is the center; we think that philosophy has always been the center and religious thinking was mistaken for that, but we must ask: How could that be? There must be a quality in religious thinking so important for man that until 1800 he always placed it in the center. We think that philosophical thinking really is the root, that out of it all the other kinds of thinking develop, that it checks, and enriches end in turn is checked and enriched by the other kinds of thinking, but there is a strange thing about religious thinking: it is not only the most refined kind of human thinking but the most daring one--the one that takes the risk almost always to transcend, trying to perceive and penetrate into the very unknown itself. It has a certain power of its own that shows the will of the human being and the very courage of the human mind itself at its highest. So while religious thinking may not be the center of human thought (as it was considered for so long), it still might be the mast strange, daring and risky adventure of human thinking--and this it certainly is.

We still, however, have to find out if religious thinking delivers any results to the human mind and have to ask? 1ihat does it do for freedom and truth? what does it do for philosophy? But first of all, perhaps, even without wanting to, it does something for human courage. This would be a most welcome performance for human beings who have to establish freedom, who have to prove it existentially by establishing freedom for themselves and by themselves and who can only prove freedom by becoming free, by acting free and by establishing it. Comprehensive thinking is in part a proposition: namely, free. If the proposition is agreed to, if it is accepted by many men who decide to take and to establish those mores of freedom really in human life, then freedom has again been proved and not before. We give subjective (not objective) proof by doing: that means we create freedom. It is given to us to create it and to make it (and then freedom is there creatively) or to reject it and not to make it (and then freedom will not be there). Scientifically it can only be proved both ways afterwards. If we would organize the whole world into a totalitarian state where no one could try himself to establish the fact of freedom, then the scientist could say, "Freedom does not exist." If we have established it to a certain degree, science would have to say, "There is freedom." But it cannot be proved as existing or not existing because it is done by us; it is a metaphysical thing: if it is not done by us it does not exist; it is a transcendent being created by us--not a given thing.

In order to try to find the answers to some of our questions, let’s now look into the question of the comprehensive--which I do not take in Jaspers' way. In the old way, without knowing it, human beings always started with a conception of the whole (the cosmos); this whole could be an organic living being, a unity, called being itself. This meant that this whole contained in itself being organically, transcendent beings that trancended human beings (Gods were also contained in the cosmos) and human beings, of course. So in a way the highest forces of the cosmos were the Gods, then man, then other living beings; they all formed a whole—the whole of being (this was the Greek idea). The same whole was conceived of in theology, but God was outside the whole--He created it. God was the highest being to whom man transcended, which led him out of the world. He either transcended to just outside the world (the Hebraic idea) or he transcended out of the world into another higher world which was the Christian hereafter. (The concept of a hereafter, which is really a Christian concept, only became a part of Jewish thinking later and is not recognised as completely valid for Jewish thought.) But both the cosmological and the theological approach have the same concept of the whole that can be known. This whole would be comprehensive and this is the meaning of comprehensive. Philosophy, which was mythical up to 1800, was concerned with the concept of the whole--until Kant proved that we live in the world, never outside of it. He showed us that we cannot say that we know anything essential about it and we try in vein if we try to deduce ideas, laws, etc., from a concept we cannot know. The same is true of God: we cannot draw any conclusions from that concept either. We cannot take the whole (either as God or the cosmos) as a philosophical argument any more.

I make a different approach and ask: It-ow could we get the idea of the comprehensive and the whole at all? Kant showed us that we cannot get a point of view outside of the world--which means we are condemned to look at the world (and ourselves too) from within and to go from point to point and to forget about the whole (which we know now might not even be a whole)--and since then we have been in a sense, as heidegger says, "thrown into the world." But in philosophy if a statement has been made, even though it now seems to be erroneous, we have to go back to ask: What made the statement possible? So we must consider: What made it possible to have an abstract idea of the whole? was it imagination or did it relate to a reality? It relates to a reality because man is that whole. Man conceives of himself per'manently by inner experience as a whole and he always has this in mind. He has consciousness of being in time but he is always conscious too of being the same in time. He never loses his consciousness of being himself. The little boy he was, he knows he still is; he knows that little boy is still the man he is. Man feels himself to be more of an entity in time the longer he lives, lIe adds the time that he lives through to his very existence in time. He is a continuous being. Human beings are also, or can be, what they are or lesser than what they have been designed to be because human beings are beings of becoming, but they are also in their becoming, beings of this continuity in time. They get the feeling of being an entity, a whole, closed-in itself to which everything can be related. And in space also they are beings that are consistent. Even as to man's bodily appearance in space there remains a certain consistency in spite of the fact that science has discovered that every seven years all the cells in his body have been replaced. In spite of this fact the form of his body, aging or not, is always consistent--and he is well aware of this consistency. This consistency in space can be even enlarged. Man can assemble things in his consciousness--and this is made possible only by his being a whole, a certain centered being with spirit as well as corporeal circumference in time and space which makes a whole, a being who can die but one who also when alive cannot help thinking of himself as a whole or being a whole. Man got the idea of conceiving of The All to be a whole by thinking of The All after his own likeness (and he was entitled to think of a whole because of that strange entity he is) and he did the utmost in imagination by having the freshness to conceive of The All in that way.

So man thought there was a comprehensive whole in which he was comprehended. We see now that this is not true, but we must ask: What is the common denominator that made this possible? In philosophy if we want to go to the root of the question, we have to ask not for the substance but for the verb, so we must ask what it means to comprehend--that is our question. We comprehend of ourselves as being comprehensive, being a whole, and we proceed in a way of comprehending. We know that in a certain way we are a whole--and we are because we are becoming a whole. We are builders of wholes--and not only in imagination. Thinking ourselves to be a whole we try to cake all our experiences, deeds, and knowledge, etc., and to relate them into one comprehensive whole, always enlarging and always trying to make ourselves this whole--where every experience we have had by being related to ourselves, to others, and to the center becomes more and more meaningful. This is our possibility: to be after the meaning of being and to find it not just by speculating about it but also by adding to the meaning by making axeaning, by designing those relationships in the whole that make it more meaningful. We are the conditioned-conditioners, the created-creators; we are dependent and independent, transforming the things we depend upon into things that depend upon us; we are builders of wholes and entities; and we are capable both of finding out the possible meaning in given events and of adding meaning wished for to the meaning that we perceive. We attempt to transform given meaning into meaning wished for by the very center of our creativeness. This ability of being comprehensive and becoming more and more comprehensive is the pure philosophical activity of man--the center and the source of the very freedom of his life and his activities. From this center out we have to develop other lines and activities of creative thinking and to see how they can relate to and derive from the center of comprehensive thinking and how we can use them for the very enrichment of this center.

We will look first into scientific thinking, symbolic thinking as to objective matter, the given, the physical. What are we doing to the physical by scientific thinking? We create symbols and by means of the symbols, we get hold of chains of occurrences. We butt into them and transform things given into things for us, into things we use. Things that have been merely in and for themselves we transform into things for us.

In art there are occurrences and experiences--which for the sake of convenience we will call here things. In art we transform all those things into beings, into things of us, as if we had made them, as if we had made them out of the very substance of our soul. A stone or tree of Cezanne's means that he has transformed things into the substance of human inwardness. The experience of the artist has created that stone and it is a part of him now, transformed into a thing of him; it is entirely humanized--not in the anthropormorphic sense, but really humanized. It has the very essence of inner human experience in it and that is why all those things, transformed into things of the artist as a human being, are also transformed into things of us as human beings. As beholders, participation, not communication, takes place; nothing is communicated--much more than that is done. We are taken into the participation of a human experience of metaphysical significance; we participate in it in an artistic way--which means that since this is an experience in participation in a very deep and entirely humanized experience, as such an artistic experience (of the beholder too) cannot be an aesthetic experience (which means merely to enjoy certain relations of forms and falls into the field of art appreciation--it certainly is not understanding of art) that can be grasped scientifically.

An artistic experience can only be grasped metaphysically-arousing associations and carrying back by those associations into experiences of our own that we have had, enriching by this our experiences of the past, making that former love experience of ours richer, making our own experiences backwardly deeper and therefore enriching our readiness for our next experience in that particular field. We will find that we will be better lovers, our free activities will have grown, and--to give a specific example--if it is a picture of Cezanne's, we will find (whether we realize it or not) that even our view of the world will have changed. This is artistic experience--all things being transformed into things of the artist, then into things of us by participation and thereby becoming the means of inter-human understanding and inter-human enriching of man's experience. This is what is really going on and what is really done by art which proceeds with the tool of the metaphor.

We also want to look briefly into two fields of creative thinking that rely on understanding, though differently so: politics and erotics. In politics it is a matter of common agreement; understanding is formulated in the political field. In erotics it is an understanding of a more immediate kind--as in love where you can understand this other person in his essence. This is the most immediate performance. Less immediate is in the case of friends where you slowly come to understanding. Then there is the relationship with comrades, as in war, with trust. Then there are casual acquaintances. And then in the political field it is in the form of common agreement but moving also by creating those things by understanding.

Now in these two fields, erotica and politics, things are involved too in the sense that we have to call human beings here things, but only abstractly so--which does not mean that we take people as things (as we have done in reality--which is something quite different). Here we take them only as objects. We change them into things or beings with us—or against us, as can happen in polities, which is the negative form of transforming them into things with us. Understanding is necessary but transformation also takes place.

Comprehensive thinking relates to things, matters and ourselves and it wants to set the possibility of the whole, of creating the whole. All those relations can only be set by transcending ourselves--first by including ourselves in the comprehensive whole. There is not just myself, there is the world and I am transforming everything, including myself, and taking the responsibility for transforming all those things, including myself, into things with possible meaning, into beings. It is possible to give up myself for a purpose or to disconsider myself, to make myself out of my own freedom a means for a higher purpose: that means I transcend myself. But I cannot make anyone else do the same. I am only entitled to propose to anyone else that he transcend himself for the same purpose because it aims at life itself, at a deeper and higher, better and richer meaning. I can propose to other people what I myself am ready to do. That a philosopher can and must do. As soon as that transcendence has taken place and everyone has come to a certain set of definite principles as to what life would be to be more life, and as soon as I have a nucleus of such in myself, then I can Imow what for I change things: that in science I change things into things for me; that in politics and love I change things into things with me; and that in art I change things into things of me. All are related to the same principle and purpose that enters my mind: the possibility of creation itself, to enrich life by making it more life. Having rejected the demonical possibility of man, I have come then by and by through all my other possibilities--and by relating them until I find that the very source has been my possibility and my wish to give something to life after receiving existence (though from where I do not know)--to the point where my inner creativeness is the ability to design those lines of richer, deeper and higher meaning to which I want to strive and which I want to transmit to others to strive for, or to be shown a better proposition, and then we all come to an agreement as to what is best. This is the way we proceed in acting out philosophical thinking and this is the outcome of the comprehensive in acting out thinking.

There is only one inner command--a command that Kant misformulated. Kant's categorical imperative was still conceived out of an imagined whole, but since we do not have that, the "you shall" can never be accepted. What we do have in us is a constant possibility of the highest kind, not given in an imperative, but as a "you can": you can do that; you can create life. The fact that the "you can" is there in full freedom gives us the possibility of going into that source of the creative performance of man and it gives us the possibility of human greatness. If you know that "you can," then the more you will have to become aware of how"you can." And if you are aware that "you can," you will know why to study philosophy--which shows you that "you can." If you are aware of that, then you become curious about how "you can"; you will have to try how. Then you will become aware how to study philosophy because it is the same thing. Now we are within the kernel itself. This is called an introductory course in philosophy and it is in the sense that it throws you into the very thing itself and is identical with the thing itself: why you have to work philosophically because of this "you can," which gives you the possibility to go into the very center of man's creativeness, and how to philosophize by finding out how you can go about this creative action in life, being concerned about life itself. So how could one not philosophize!

When we philosophize we become concerned with giving. Before this we are always prepared for receiving. We are born with the idea that we have something coming to us and what happens to this idea depends upon how we are reared--especially if we are not reared in religion. Although even religion does not mean to give, but to give up, it provides at least a guarantee against falling into the vulgarity we are all born with instinctively--getting used to asking for more and more, taking life for granted. Only if we have eiven birth to ourselves, so to speak (which is why philosophy is there--if only for this insight), will we get any real life except the experience of an instant in time that we are using up. We cannot feel life until we know that we can give it--and then, and only then, will we have it. This rebirth is not mystical but a performance of straight thinking: that means thinking about our very possibilities and the possibilities and capabilities of everyone, thinking about being itself; thinking about all this with an understanding of the human being as a specific being, as the only whole we know of, and taking this whole that we can best know of into account, trying to find out how we can make it a real whole.

To find what our different capabilities are and what different methods we have to handle those capabilities in order to make them work is our way to really get into life itself. We have been inquiring into all these different capabilities and methods and have gained some idea of what philosophical, artistic and scientific thinking might be and what kind of thinking is used in politics and erotics--but we still do not know what religious thinking might be. We have found that seemingly our highest possibility is to transcend ourselves for the sake of the world we would think better, the life we would think richer, which we would want to give. This is our central ability. Nietzsche, unable to overcome the nihilistic situation because he could not make a new approach to being, dived into the deepest despair. Finding that perhaps there was no possible approach and having lost the idea of the comprehensive whole (knowing that it could not exist), he sale. the most noble worlds of man: "At least we can do one thing: that which life had seemed to have promised to us--let's give that promise to life." never before has there been such a man—a man who so entirely renounced everything he could ask for and yet who could still gather the courage to say: Let us be true ourselves to our own promises. This is the last refuge when man is lost and this is the only noble answer given to the nihilistic situation. This answer granted to me the way to line. that metaphysical reality out of which we had grown the whole in which we lived for thousands of years. We know that we cannot live in the real sense if we do not come to the very source of creativity and get more ready to transcend ourselves and to make the world transcendent by trying to infuse the meaning into the world that we find to be meaning in ourselves and among ourselved. That is real life—but once again, we still have to ask: What is religious thinking?

Religious thinking--or what we will call for the moment religious thinking but is really a kind of thinking that helped to bring religious thinking about--prevails in Nietzsche for instance: If it is so that life has nothing to give to us in spite of all the promises made to us by life, we can still try to give something to life; it can still be good. To be able to say that means to be in possession of an unbelievable inner courage and it is the same courage that Jaspers has in his book when he talks about the idea of God--not knowing--that he is in the same position that Nietzsche was in. Jaspers loves the example of Jeremiah (which he interprets wrongly) where Jeremiah comes to the vision that God might not save Israel, that God might destroy the world and man with it, and yet he still can say, “Praise be to God because God is.” Jeremiah was a believer and he could renounce every hope for himself and humanity and still say, “Let us serve God.” Jeremiah’s courage was great, and Nietzsche’s even greater because he did not even have God, but both--Nietzsche as well as Jeremiah--were religious thinkers; both went back to the source in man of a possibility of absolute trust in spite of everything that might speak against it, to that source that is the very core of the indestructible strength of' this metaphysical transcendent being who seems to have been there only to live in hope (because religion was built on hope) and then lost it. But with the possibilities given to us by free philosophy we will not have to live in hope now--or in despair because we have lost hope--because our inner surety can be established by this "you can" which gives us the possibility to know what we can do. We won't need higher help or have to ask for more things to be given. We won't have to ask for more or to live in hope--which is what religion has meant.

We have to realize what unbelievable courage it took for those few prophets and Jesus of Nazareth (Jesus--who cried out, "Father! why have you forsaken me?" and yet knowing that he was forsaken, went ahead and did what he felt he had to do) who dared to live without hope--and yet what about the courage of non-believers, men tortured to death in concentration camps who did not confess. They were forgotten men; they could not be heroes; they could not go into any traditions because no one could know about them; they were not believers so they did not even have God--yet they stood fast. How? Where did that tremendous courage come from? They gained their force of resistence by the sudden realization of this "you can”-- you can for what you think can be true; you--man--can be true; you can say, "This is how I think life should be--without this denial, if I should confess, to be used by others to break other backbones." They did it without any possibility of reward, absolutely alone and without anything except what they could do and wanted to do because they thought it was the true. This courage we see in them, in Nietzsche, in Jeremiah. Only in utter despair when all religion is lost is there a possibility of pure transcendence, transcendence based upon transcendence for the sake of transcendence itself and for no other purpose--Jeremiah, for example, to the God he could understand no longer but still having the possibility of pure and absolute trust and transcendence in spite of everything.

This is not religious thinking but mystical thinking--and not mystical thinking in the form we have seen in the Jews or the medieval mystics. As long as any hope is left (end there was always the hope to reunite their souls with God--a reward was expected) a psychological performance can be shown to be at the basis of it. The thing is done to be happy, to gain peace of mind--even to feel marvelous. This can all be a psychological performance and can be doubted as to its real creative energy. But here with this thinking (Jeremiah, Nietzsche, the unknown non-believers who stood fast) there is no hope, no reward is expected; it is done with despair, utter despair. It is real mystical thinking: that means man can do this because there is an unknown--end because it is mystical thinking, it is only unknown. That the unknown is God would be religious thinking, but we are talking for the moment now about a pure phenomenon that helped bring about religious thinking: the pure mystical experience of man and his inner strength to transcend completely, to disregard any satisfaction for himself for the sake of transcendence. That there is an unknown spot, an unknown part of the world, with man transcending to this unknown and putting his trust into that and doing so absolutely, means philosophically speaking to recognize, to realize, and to live to the full and utter depths the fact that man is a limited being and might not know the last things and that because of this he is able in the last moment to transcend into what is not known and by that regain the creative courage of his life. This is mystical thinking and experience and it is very rare.

We have said that the religious thinker is concerned with goodness first, truth second, but philosophically speaking what goodness might be we would have to find out by trying to find out what it really is—which means truth first. So the approach to goodness first cannot be accepted by free men because it implies a certain sacrifice of freedom. A philosopher cannot accept this, but this phenomenon of religious thinking must lead us to what helped to bring it about. A Catholic priest, if driven into a corner, will agree to everything about the church, but then he will finally say: "But the church is only that as it is a worldly being. It is nothing but a symbol--the symbol of the inner church." And the inner church is only the saints--no Pope really counts. By and by more and more of the church is rejuvenated by the saints who live on. In talking about this idea of the saints we see that it is the very idea we find in the Abrahamidic story of Sodom and Gomorrah--if there were ten just men in Sodom, the city could not be destroyed. There was an old Hebrew belief that everyone might be fakers, the greatest people might be imposters, and all might be lost but for the thirty-six quiet ones in the country, the hidden righteous men whom no one knew and this was why God did not destroy Israel. This is also the same idea as the saints in the church and has come out of having seen men like Jeremiah, people who can set against absolute despair, absolute transcendence. There is a dim awareness in all religions of one overwhelming power given to certain men in extreme situations--which in India is where the belief of Buddha came from. Out of a long tradition of Hindu sayings that certain men become so wise that they might be able to make the Gods do something, Buddha came to the idea of abolishing the Gods altogether for holiness itself, for absolute purity.

All of these things are realities of the human mind and are indications not only of the strength of the human mind that can trust when everything is against it--which is a sign given for a seemingly indestructible quality of the human being (and this indestructible quality is one of the reasons why the idea of the immortality of man could have been conceived of at all)--but also of the indestructibility of the human will to transcend. That trust, when everything speaks against it, and that will to transcend are the core of mystical creativeness and we have to take this into account as a very hidden but absolutely creative possibility of man because while we may not be able to account for it, we can prove it to be there and while it may be hidden, it is not obscure--it is quite clear and can be observed. (For example: if one has had the misfortune to think he is dying, he will certainly experience that flash; he will suddenly feel that strength coming up in him.) So while modern scientists want to disallow this possibility of man because it is a hot iron for any scientist who wants to know everything (or for any philosopher too who wants to pretend to know), nevertheless we have it, we are it (even though we do not know what it is), and we have to take it into account; otherwise we would be fakers by taking it for granted that this is an illusion--and this we cannot do. We, as philosophers or as philosophical men and women, have to keep in contact with genuine religious people and their experiences have to be considered by us; otherwise we cut out one of our abilities--and this we do not want to do, not only because it might needlessly cripple us, but also because we pretend to be after truth.

Lecture IX

We have talked about the possible relationship between the different creative possibilities of man--not only as we think that relationship to be possible now (as a system of creative activities of man built around the center of free philosophical thinking) but also as it existed up to 1800 held together as a conglomerate around the center of a mythical concept. We have talked about the position of man in the world as long as that mythical concept in whatever form (religious, philosophical, or scientific) held, giving him the feeling of being a comprehensive being contained within a comprehensive whale and leaving him a certain small space of freedom (the choice between good and evil) --but never really giving him the chance to be concerned with the fact that he might not be determined at all.

Now I want to talk about what happened to man's position in the world when all this was gone, and want to make you aware of the tremendous change that really took place with Kant--because it takes a long time (sometimes as long as a hundred years) to realize the implications of such a thing. That man's position in the world has been changed cannot be doubted--giving him for the first time the possibility to discover just how free he might be able to make himself and to see just to what extent he might or might not be determined. But along with this also there is the fear that comes from man's realizing that he is no longer in the womb of myth, religion or whatever it might have been, and that there is no guarantee of sureness any more. Kierkegaard expressed this new situation of man in the world by saying that man is in a situation where he faces nothingness. Actually this is not the basic fear of man, as Kierkegaard supposed--though the effect seems to be that. It is rather that man faces an infinity of possibilities where he does not know what to choose. But even he in the very beginning is still given to a certain degree that fundamental assurance that has always been given to man on awakening (either by religion, or the cosmos, or his parents): the assurance of his being rightly there in the world. The real difference is that this assurance does not hold--as it did in the past before Kant. As soon as he grows up (if he is one of the best of them--with a mind to work with), he becomes aware of having before him a confused infinity of possibilities—which amounts to the staring into nothingness of Kierkegaard. So it is small wonder that things have taken such a way.

This course and the criticism of the nihilistic situation is not done in order to make people feel doomed, but it does have to be done in order to make people aware of the situation and also aware of all the implications of the deed of Kant. After Kant, men tried to establish themselves as free men--and in America a certain freedom was established and guaranteed by the Constitution, but in all other countries in the West the battles of freedom were in vain. But it must also be said that even what has been done here in America, while due to the formal fact that this freedom has been anchored in the Constitution, still is not guaranteed against being overcame by the nihilistic movement (and this is a danger which certainly does exist since American society, as well as European society, is nihilistic). Up to now a watch has been kept over our freedom by the American republic (rather than by American democracy, as is often supposed), but if that republic is broken, then democracy will turn out here as in other places: a mass movement by majority vote that will finally abolish our freedom. There is no "ism" or movement that does not finally in the end lead into slavery because in the nihilistic situation we are driven in our very search for another womb to believe in one overall comprehensive being after another that has become merely a deification and mystification of super-human forces--forces that are not transhuman (as God was) but inhuman and which by this very inhuman quality make man anti-human and demonic. In the very process of conforming to them, he loses his qualities as a human being--which means first of all freedom.

So there is no way back into over-all comprehensive being where we can be assured of ourselves. If religion seems to be the answer--and then I would recommend that we go back to the Abrahamidic religion, because that is the highest concept--it must be remembered that if we would have to do that, it would mean to confess that full freedom is not possible for man. It would mean also that we would have to give up philosophy altogether because in that case philosophy taken in its purity would not be possible for man and it would only lead to one substitute concept of God after another, one worse and more dangerous and demoniacal than the last. We have the choice either to prove that freedom is possible and under what conditions and with what responsibilities or to confess that philosophy has failed and that philosophy could only be effective before it made the claim with Kant that it could show that man could live in freedom and for truth without a higher power. We have either to show that man can live in freedom like that or we have to confess that philosophy had to fail and that we have to go back to religion. But unfortunately, if that is the case, we woule. not even know how to do that because religion now is mainly a psychological performance. Once the belief of youth is severed, to go back to belief is almost impossible. There is still the possibility to go back to faith, but we do not know if man can live by faith.

Is there a way to prevent the pseudo-metaphysical approach that claims to know an over-all being that determines us completely? Is there a means to destroy this? Is philosophy, as pure philosophy, an absolute ideology killer? If not, it would be better to confess that it relies on religion. But that would mean that philosophy could not be free or independent and if philosophy cannot be free or independent, man cannot be so. Thus a negative or a positive conclusion has to be made because our age has shown that what has been called philosophy since 1800 is actually pseudo- or anti-philosophical, its very opposite, moving according to theories (theories of nature, history, etc.) we already took for granted and lived by. Two great totalitarian states have arisen from those theories in the guise of philosophy--which in turn brought those theories down to their most vulgar level: to certain race or class fetishes.

Philosophy up to 1800 was unconsciously uncritical--bolstered up by religious belief or belief in the cosmos and its assumptions were always taken for granted--but this new so-called philosophy was consciously uncritical. With Kant no philosophy could be unconsciously uncritical any more as soon as he showed that neither God nor the cosmos could be used as an argument and that every assumption must be accounted for--which meant that no philosopher was ever entitled any more to take the assumption of God or the cosmos in any form for granted, and that to do so (or to say that he knew) was betrayal. Yet Hegel and Marx pretended to know the cosmos and what the laws of history and nature were, how we absolutely determined by them, and how and why we must do what was determined by them--giving us a substitute for freedom. When they tried to tell us that the more insight we had into necessity, the freer we would be (which is a most ridiculous proposition) it was not freedom they offered but slavery called freedom--the absolute lie. They did not even account for how they could bring freedom and necessity together.

Now when the religious Jew speaks of obedience (and obedience to God is the mainstay of the Hebrew religion), he means that a religious man must be obedient to God for the simple reason that the only way to righteousness and the only way to live human life so that it can be understood is through obedience because only God knows what is just. If you would say to him, "But you are a slave.", he would answer: "Yes! a slave of God--or rather a conscious servant of God and I am glad to be one because I do not see how man can keep his humanity without it." But no religious Jew has ever said that the joy of living was just that obedience--the joy was given by Jehovah for a righteous life. Obedience was not supposed to be joy but labor, pain and suffering, as Job was ready to suffer, and no one was ever crazy enough to say that obedience was the joyful thing. But the pseudo-theologian, pseudo-metaphysician, and pseudo-scientist all rolled into one in the ideologist ready asks that we—being slaves and consciously so (doing only what necessity requires), being absolute automatons--should enjoy this absolute obedience. He tells us that this is the joy of life and if we do not conform, we cannot enjoy ourselves. This is how they--the ideologist, the modern expert, the pseudo-metaphysician, the pseudo-scientist (all made possible by the claims of nihilistic philosophers who claimed to be positivistic philosophers)--have succeeded to make conformism (which is demonic as well as anti-conformism is) almost a fanatical performance--just by the proposition that the more the intellect works us into slavery, the more our joy should be--and this is how they have succeeded to make the human mind crazy enough to believe it.

Kant already conceived of man as having more freedom than the philosophers before him and already thought that freedom might be deeper and broader than only the choice between good and evil (it might be the choice of making good or evil), but he was still of the opinion that man could not do that without a higher command. This he expressed first by saying that man could not move reasonably in freedom if he did not believe deistically in the existence of a higher being because if he did not, he would have no possibility to exert the freedom he had. Man could exercise his freedom by command from a higher power--but now Kant wanted to make a compromise. He did not think it could be a direct command, so he established his categorical imperative: man has a so-called inner voice, an inner command (which Kant really made out of conscience), which implanted in the most abstract form is the "you shall.” The commandments of all religion were taken into one general commandment--the general idea of the command in man himself that keeps in touch with God.

Kant's prophecy about reason and belief seems to have been a wise one because as soon as the pseudo-philosophers of the 19th Century (who were nevertheless still great thinkers, though they betrayed philosophy) came along, they tried--they skipped belief, as it had been known up to then, and as soon as they did, what Kant said seemed to become true. Freedom could not be practiced at all and it seemed almost the fulfillment of Kant's prophecy. But must it have been so? Was there not perhaps another reason other than the one of losing belief? Was that really the motive for the fact that we failed to grasp freedom? Was it not perhaps that philosophy having gained the possibility of coming into its own, of becoming pure philosophy (up to 1800 philosophy lived in an impure state mixed up with other capabilities and capacities of man--although with the Greeks it claimed--without saying so--to be concerned first with freedom, which meant to be concerned with truth first and goodness second) turned instead into its very opposite by not discarding belief at all but rather substituting the old belief in God, which after all gave man the guarantee of a certain restricted freedom, with its own anti-philosophical claim of belief under the mask of science, which gave man no guarantee at all. If we want to try to establish philosophy on its own and thus man on his own--for philosophy coming into its own means nothing but man coming into his own--we have to destroy belief. We can make no use of belief at all; we must proceed on pure reason. And if we cannot establish freedom on the ground of pure reason, then it means we have confessed that we cannot establish it at all.

So what I have to say about philosophy up to Kant also includes Kant in that sense and the later philosophers even more so. They have always been the interpreters and the experts of higher powers and in this respect no real difference between the philosopher or the priest or the theologian or the pseudo-scientist can be found. They have all ruled men by pretending to be only translators to man of higher commands received--which means that the question of authority, taken in its very fundament is involved here. They have all moved according to the principle of authority; they have all tried to establish their authority first as authoritarian persons--either as the ones chosen by God to transmit God's commandments or as the initiated ones who by their inherent nature, by birth or genius or certain special talents, have to know and do know better. This means in modern terms the experts who can tell us what to do, who can claim that in any situation they are the ones who can make up our minds. We ourselves are not able to make up our minds without the chosen or initiated ones who have secret knowledge in quality different from ours--either by being the chosen ones or because they are geniuses of some kind, etc. The claim of authority is always there.

The only ones in all the history of human beings who can be discharged of that accusation are the artists--but only up to the 19th Century and then they too claimed to be geniuses, initiated beings different in quality from other human beings. This was the first attempt of artists to think of themselves as authorities and until then, they had never done so. They might have claimed--but in humility--that the muses themselves had taught them to see (as Homer did), but they did not say that Apollon had taught them or that they were initiated by a higher power. The artists gave what they created for the free use of human beings and there was no claim of mastership except within the work itself. No commitment was attached and men could take it or leave it. In the 19th Century the artist also became an expert and became conscious of himself--wanting to inherit from the priest absolute authority and to arrogate it to himself. The modern nihilistic ideologist was the example for the artist to raise similar claims for himself, but with one difference: he never raised them with force; he just expressed them in arrogant behavior. The artist has never said, "If you don't look at my pictures, you will just be a dope over whom history will move." or "If you don't look at my pictures you will just be a failure." They have not said a "you must"; they have only said, “You will miss a great experience." But the delusion of grandeur was one of the sicknesses that moved into the artists too.

Let's now consider experts--experts of all kinds past and present. Plato said that the model state, "the republic" (and thus humanity itself), would never become perfect until kings would be philosophers or philosophers would be kings. Not all philosophers have raised that claim, but all have moved along that line. Only Plato had the courage to say what they all meant: to be the wise men. Authority was crystallized in types: the wise man, the hero, the saint and the genius. In all history that we know those types were the ideal types of humanity--not arch-types but ideal types in the sense of Max Weber: types which were points of directions in the development of man and every man. Every man had an idea of most perfect accomplishment when he became either a sage, saint, hero or genius. These ideal types--and all are types of experts--exclude only the ideal that a free man can set for himself: to conceive of the truth that there is no proposition man can set to himself that is a tough as the proposition for everyone to become a man or woman--and for this he needs no expert. Man is a being of becoming, a being that can become human, a being that is only a sketch at first of a person. Man is a being that by inner transcendence can set the aim to become a person, to become a personality. This possibility that every man has of self-transcendence (a transcendence of the very self he is enclosed in in order to become a man) is a very tough proposition--but the proposition to become a man is still tougher yet. Bound up with this is also the fact that he cannot became a person unless he tries--exerting all his forces of creativeness--to transform the world given into a world made more and more meaningful. At that price-- and only at that price--can he become a man.

But to think that man has to become something more than himself, that he has to transcend his very quality as man (becoming a hero, a saint, a sage or a genius--becoming an expert) means to have a wrong and very dangerous concept of transcendence. "To transcend one's self" in this sense--which is quite a different proposition from the self-transcendence I have been proposing (to become more and more of a man or woman, more and more of a human being with more and more qualities of man)--means the destruction, or the beginning of it, of human qualities themselves. Such a concept of transcendence has always had this threat of the destruction of human qualities because it means to objectify one's self--which is the first step to demonization--but as long as the framework and brake held that had always been put on those wise men, heroes, saints, and geniuses by the belief in the existence of God, this threat never really came through. As long as there was that brake (the belief in God), they could not become entirely objectified, and thus entirely demonical, because there was always God to be responsible to--He set a limit. But the moment that God was gone, it meant that at the same moment the process of objectification could become (and did become) unlimited and thus demonical. To abolish in one's self every quality of a human being for the sake of being something more than man seems to be a very high price to pay--but no price seems to be too high to achieve those ideals that have become ideas.

An ideal, though it might never be reached, gives direction to a recognized over-all concept of goodness, but an ideal changes into an idea (which is an unlimited ideal of performance) the moment it is approached by a process of de-humanization in order to reach or come near that ideal--becoming with this an idea for which a man, in order to become identical with it, can be ready to sacrifice everything to become an expert. This is why we have to do away with these ideal types once and for all. Whatever directional value they had became immediately with the loss of religion and its center an infinite proposition of ideas, taking out of men every kind of humanity. And along with these ideal types, we have also to abolish the authority (the expert) altogether now because he has became a mortal danger for man's freedom and existence as man. Even the old guarantee of the authority holding himself responsible to a higher authority no longer is enough--for the simple reason that the higher authority itself has became a mortal danger.

Formerly, when an authority recognized a higher authority above him to which he held himself accountable it meant that a certain remainder of humanity was always guaranteed in that authority because the higher authority was God--and God as a personal concept. But the moment the concept of God is gone, it means that even if the authority is conscientious (and let's assume for the moment that he is conscientious) and tries to hold himself accountable, he holds himself accountable to a higher authority that is a non-human, a-human force (history, society, nature); he holds himself accountable to a higher force that is an idea--society taken as a higher force or history taken merely as an idea. Now while there is a certain reality to an idea, it can always be interpreted differently every day: that means the authority cannot be considered to be strictly accountable to his higher authority in the sense one was accountable to God because he is an interpreter of a higher force--which God never was--and whatever its realities might be. Vurtherrnore, when the authority was accountable to God, whatever he did (and there were times when same of them tried very hard indeed) he could never get an inhuman proposition; but our new authority, even if he wanted to, could not get advice back from a non-human, a-human force that would contain a human proposition. It is always an inhuman answer that can only take a matter of fact into account--an answer that is supposed to be for the human being who on the other hand is a matter of intention. So we have to say to the authority? "If you want to rule us as an authority, then go back to religion—where at least, if you become a tyrant and a master, you are restricted. Otherwise we will have to abolish you as an authority and show you that we can do without authorities."

But what do we replace the authorities with?--for man has not shown himself to be particularly able to get along without them. For example: we have claimed to do everything for the sake of production, but unfortunately, this just is not true. We have only done things for the sake of consumption and have only the aim of consumption. Production for production's sake--like the Gothic cathedrals, for example--has always been done in the past by its having been enforced by the ruling class and at the cost of our blood sometimes. The moment there was no authority to enforce that highest human performance upon us, we did not do it. So the argument of the opposition--that you haven't shown very much what you could do with your freedom--is true, but on the other hand, the length of time since 1600 has not been very long either and there is no reason to despair if we have failed a few times. We might try again to establish freedom by the only capability that can (because it is the only one that understands what freedom is): philosophy--free philosophy and not pseudo-philosophy. But first we must criticize what has been done in the meantime and we must tell these experts: "Either you hold yourselves accountable to God or we must abolish you because you intend to be our absolute masters and we know it."

Authority seems to have been needed for the most part of our history--and the one time we tried to do without it, we seem to have failed. We have only shown that we can create absolute authority instead--totalitarians who cannot even be held responsible to given texts. We cannot hold Stalin responsible to the given text of Marx or the pseudo-scientist completely responsible to his text, whatever it is, but the authority who is accountable to God can be held responsible to his text. And no matter how hard he might try, he will never get around the fact of justice, righteousness or goodness in a religious text; he can never abolish them. If he tries to find arguments against the eternal principles of mankind, he will find that he cannot--and that is how the brake works if the expert holds himself accountable to God. But the expert who deals with pseudo-scientific texts (though they have pure scientific values too) will always be able to squirm out of them and to exclude those principles absolutely for the simple reason those texts are not based on those principles. You will say that Marx wanted freedom and justice--which he most certainly did. So what do I mean when I say that he did not establish those things as principles? and if not, what did he establish then? He established ideas--claiming to know what freedom was, what justice was--which means that we can then make the proposition that we are entitled to handle our enemies or our friends with absolute injustice because we are striving for the realization of the absolute ideal of justice, which will come out of that in the end.

If we conceive of justice as a principle, we do not claim that. Justice claimed as a principle in the Jewish and Christian religions (mostly in the Jewish) meant that only God knew what justice really was. Men, as much as they were able, had to act justly, but they could never claim to know what justice was and they were never able to say: "Let's cut out justice for a while to bring it about later." Justice taken as a principle--though without religion--in free philosaphy also means that we know that we cannot know the whole of justice, that we do not know what it is absolutely. We only know that we can move according to that principle in all our actions. While justice is something we do not know, it is also something we can establish; we can claim partial action: we can act today in a way that seems to be more just than our action yesterday--and this is creative. This eternal thing, justice, is not an idea we can grasp to the full and for its sake do injustice; we rather have to try to establish more of it in every single situation put before us, in every decision we have to make. Justice cannot be postponed; we have to try to establish more and more of it here and now--and this means to conceive of justice as a principle and not an idea.

There can never be such a thing as full justice, only fuller justice; it is comparative only, not absolute. Full justice could only be spoken of in the Jewish and Christian religions--and then it meant that it was only by God Himself, the only one who knew what it was, that full justice could be established. Marx secularized this and applied it without God--without God being the living center--and this is the greatest harm that can be done to human beings: to say that freedom and justice can be known to the full and can be established once and for all, that an absolute state of freedom and justice can be established. If that is possible and people believe that it is so, they will be ready to kill almost everyone who dares to doubt it. They won't count the corpses in order to reach that goal. This is a craziness of human bein~s to think themselves able to establish the absolute on earth, and if they are driven by such an idea, they become entirely demonized, not shrinking back from anything to achieve that goal, that utopia--ane. that is just the meaning of utopia. There are only scientific utopias and when pseudo-science becomes pseudo-metaphysics, it too becomes utopian.

In religion there are no utopias. We do not claim to know when God will establish heaven on earth; this will be brought about by God and we can do nothing for it. But utopia is a dream to establish absolute goodness, justice, freedom on earth--an absolute unmovable by the decision of human beings. The very meaninglessness of this claim is contained in the positivistic form of the nihilistic movement--with no one ever asking the question: What would life be if we had that? Does it not really mean that at that moment the very system of principles (beauty, justice, truth, freedom) woula fall down and with it freedom itself would fall down? The very fact that freedom exists for man at all depends upon the fact that justice, freedom, truth, beauty can never exist as such--for if they did, we would become automatons of realized ideals that had ceased to be principles and no freedom at all would be possible. lean would no longer be able to claim that he establishes freedom or that he establishes justice--and among other things it would be the most boring life one could conceive of.

What they managed to do when they conceived of the idea of utopia was to take the Christian heaven down to earth. In the Mohammedan heaven, at least, errors can be committed, but the Christian heaven is always the most boring proposition--as we see in Dante. Dante's "Inferno" is interesting, but what about his "Paradiso"? That eternal singing of the angels must really get on one's nerves. Dante, of course, was not trying to make the concept ridiculous, but to make a preliminary concept of an entirely other world so different that it could not really be described and he tried to the utmost to make in that sense a meaningless description of heaven. But utopians have succeeded to invent a world that looks like the Christian heaven with beauty, justice, goodness known to their fullest qualities. It would mean that we could only sing, but could not even invent songs any more. We would have left life behind us.

There seems to be one essential pre-condition for the man who conceives of a utopia and for the man who accepts the idea: both must have lost their common sense--certainly the man who makes a utopia must get rid of his common sense for it is only by doing so that he can make a utopia at all. When the nihilistic philosophers rejected entirely the critical and comprehensive ability of man, they succeeded in abolishing it so completely that even its common root, common sense, was abolished--making it easier and easier for man to fall prey to the most ridiculous propositions. And when the pseudo-philosopher succeeded in making common sense suspect, he also succeeded in making it just that much easier for man to fall into the trap of accepting authority unquestioningly.

Now certainly there are areas where man has to delegate authority in greater or lesser degrees and one area that demands the most authority is science. But that does not mean that the scientific expert, as he seems to think, should be given absolute authority. It is quite true that I must trust my doctor to a certain degree, but I still have to accept a certain amount of responsibility for these things--and the more responsibility the greater the danger of absolute authority seems to be. A doctor might tell me that I have to lose a leg or I might die without ever hitting upon the idea that I might rather die, but so long as I have that choice at least, I have a safeguard. But the time might come if a state gets hold of medicine and socializes it (I don't want to argue here against socialized medicine, but only to point out certain dangers that are possible.) that an expert can tell me that I have to be operated on. If a situation should come about where I am no longer able to argue (as I can here in the United States), where I am not even supposed to know how a medicine works, then I must protest that I am supposed to know how it works. For if one does not accept responsibility for these things, the time can or might come when a man can find himself in a totalitarian hospital systematically being poisoned to death without being able to help himself.

In Germany there was a system of files kept as part of their program of socialized medicine. The patient had to tell the doctor, who was no longer required to keep this information confidential, the family history in regard to tuberculosis, and this information then went into the state file. In the Nuremburg trials it was discovered that there was an order of Hitler's specifying that after all the Jews and the Poles had been exterminated and Germany was back to peace, the next thing to be done would be to sterilize or exterminate all the people who had parents or grandparents with a history of tuberculosis --and the files were already there waiting. Here we see what could have been the result of socialized medicine in this crazy utopia where the experts could exchange via files and without restrictions their information and their opinions about you, the patient. Here the rule of the expert could have become in the end the rule of annihilation because every point of restraint where the expert could have been checked was gone.

Now, once again, please do not misunderstand me. My attempt to show what can happen to socialized medicine in a totalitarian state certainly does not mean that I am against socialized medicine in itself, but in an age and situation of man marked by the ghost of paper, where the filing system becomes independent of man, in an age and situation where the demonic is very much alive before us and where it might change any day into our death sentence through those movements we have engaged in with the experts, we must also be aware of certain dangers that can be involved and make all possible checks against them. To put the expert back into his framework where he can be useful again without such danger to us means not only to distinguish every creative human ability each from the other but also to distinguish what the possible limits of each creative human ability might be--putting them into working order so that no short-circuit can happen, so that no absolute expert (like Hitler) can use all the knowledge of the experts against us.

So philosophy in its pure form is a life and death matter for human beings today. It is the only thing to help us not to fall prey to those utopian performances in which we are already involved; and since philosophy is the only central human ability to which all the others are related, and the only one which can explain all the others in their essence as well as their limits, it is also the only creative human ability that can put limits to them and thereby avoid the nihilistic utopian movements. This means first (since we are already in them and since the mechanics of those utopias are ideologies) a philosophical criticism of politics because that is our only means to stop their immediacy--end it is only with philosophy that a criticism of politics can be done. Politics has never been considered a creative possibility of man, but it is most essential that an inquiry be made into this--not only because a criticism of politics must be our starting point of restraint against those nihilistic movements but also because we need criticisms of all those creative abilities of man in order to bring them into their own and into a certain order so that they cannot mix us up. Only the fullness and orderliness of our capabilities can make the fullness and orderliness of man himself. So once again, from the aspect of world history this time, we seem to see that philosophy must be worked at by man because this is the condition for man to become a free man. If philosophy is done by everybody, with everybody trying to become a philosophical man able to criticize everything that happens, and if everything is done according to man's main purpose of freedom and wholeness, then he can at least protect himself and come to self-determination.

Lecture X

To mark the absolute turn-about in the philosophical thinking of man and to bring out the difference between our raving been ruled by experts up to 1800 (and even more so and in a worse manner since then) and the possibility to come to pure philosophy, which is the life-and-death matter of free men, we want to first look into the statement of Plato that the philosopher has to be king and his position that a real human community could not be created or would not be possible without philosophers being kings or kings being philosophers. He tried to make a utopia (which was the first and most harmless form of a utopia) where philosophers would be the ruling class and all other classes subdued to them and he thought that by this he could bring about a community of iron stability. This "republic" of his is a caricature of all striving for the absolute power of the mind over the mind of men. And if we want to go along with Jefferson ("We are enemies of any tyranny over the mind of man."), then we have to consider the worst tyranny that con be established to be the tyranny established by the mind of man itself when that mind pretends to be absolute, when it pretends to know itself and to know that the eternal ideas (justice, freedom, beauty, wisdom, the good and love) to their full are. If we pretend to knew that, then we will feel entitled to enforce those absolute truths upon ourselves and upon other men and out of that idea such a caricatur'e as Plato's becomes possible.

Kant by showing; the limits of human reason opened up the possibility to reject higher authority--God or the cosmos--but he tried to place two guarantees, which he hoped would be iron-clad, to help man from going over the borderline: his categorical imperative (where he put the command of authority always uttered by God or philosophy into a more abstract "you shall" which was a concept of absolute duty and was designed to be a guarantee for men who were trying to establish themselves as absolutely free so they would not go over the line) and his position that in order for man to be able to function reasonably he had to make place for belief in God, immortality and freedom. When we rejected authority absolutely, as we apparently did in the French and American Revolutions, we established certain truths as undoubtable, but upon a closer inquiry into especially the American Revolution we see that these so-called self-evident truths and inalienable rights were founded very much upon the same thing as the guarantees that Kant tried to provide--and we see also that these guarantees are not very iron-clad. If we do not believe in God--or at least in a theistic concept of God--we will find that we do not have such a "you shall" and we will also find ourselves in doubt as to how men can be born free and equal. Men can be considered to be born free only because they are the children of god (which holds true even if it is just a theistic concept of God), but once the belief in God is gone, the supposition falls down and without it we enter into the nihilistic age where everyone tries to find out for himself.

We started out to abolish authority--to abolish the principle of authority that made Plato's statement (which is the essence of the authority principle) possible that philosophers should be kings and kings should be philosophers, and the authority that would have made it possible to make the same statement about priests (religious thinkers could also have established such a "republic"--and did after Moses). But this principle of authority that we abolished by our so-called democracies was replaced immediately with another authority--and one which turned out to be much worse and certainly much more lethal than the former one. We brought ourselves under authority or authorities which were no longer transcendent but within the world, authorities which were ideas; we brought ourselves under the authority of ideas.

The United States was conceived of as a free republic, but it contains also that absolute thing of a mass democracy (we are that too), which the Constitution calls "the rule of the people." The authority there is the people within certain boundaries given by the Constitution and, as it is conceived of, is not absolute authority, but if it ever really comes through it can lead to totalitarianism. What can happen if the people have absolute authority we can see in the Weimar Fepublic. Hitler in the last election almost got the majority of the German people (his swindle amounted only to about 3 to 5 per cent). If we assume he had that majority, it would mean that the abolishing of freedom was done by the authority of a majority of the Gernian people. So democracy as a political idea is not at all what the American Constitution means in guaranteeing the rights of the minority. This is a wonderful idea, but it is based upon the principles of a republic, not a democracy. A republic is made up of free constituents and as long as one constituent disagrees, his right to disagree has to be preserved; a democracy, on the other hand, means that as soon as a majority vote is received, the will of the majority has to be carried out because the people's authority has replaced God's authority. This is not a concept but an idea that sta-ted with the idea of a super-human entity--the people--who would receive the authority after the authority of God, the king, nobility and the priests was gone; the people would now be the authority. If this were carried throurh here in the United States, it might lead to such an event as almost happened in gem any where the people by mass democracy can overthrow their freedom.

But the real principle of authority involved here, insofar as the United states is a republic, is a own in just the fact that authority, though we do not know where it is derived from, is not contained in the people but in a voluntary human agreement and declaration of will of free persons: the Constitution. And that means, since authority is not contained in the people but in the Constitution, that if 80 per cent of the people would decide to make Mr. McCarthy the Hitler of America and to abolish the Constitution and establish a totalitarian state, they would be the breakers of the Constitution and the remaining 20 per cent would be entitled to raise mmhine guns against them because the majority would be rebellious against the free republic. So the voice of the people is by no means the new substitute for the voice of God here--but the consequences could become those of a democracy socially with the same trends as in other states in the world without a guarantee such as ours because our guarantee, the Constitution, could become tomorrow only a piece of paper. As a free declaration of human will, the Constitution can hold only so long as that declaration of will is understood--and to make that declaration of will really understood would mean to create an ideal republic (which here is only outlined).

To make an ideal republic we would first have to find out on what authority it is based if not on the authority of the people or of God either, and to ask: What could that authority possibly be? on what could it possibly be based? It would be based on trust--on the trust of human persons always to want to be really and absolutely free--but since this trust might not be justified because it is only- a trust, it would mean that everyone who wanted to live up to it would have to make himself someone who could be trusted in that respect. It would mean that in order to become a reliable constituent of a free republic, he would have to try to become a real, whole free person—if only so he could be trusted and be a man who could really hold up such a daring constitution which put such a trust in him. The American Constitution, metaphysically speaking, (was the moat daring thing politically ever undertaken by men in an attempt to try to establish a community of real free men, and it was undertaken with the knowledge that most men are not free men because they do not know what it is and only with the hope that it might develop.

This courage in the trust of the human will to freedom is the metaphysical basis of the Constitution and it seems almost a foolish trust considering what human beings are moved by politically in our time. The will to freedom that is absolute and arbitrary and which seems to be the basis of America and the other will manifested in the Constitution to build a free republic of free men based upon trust and voluntary agreement have always stood against each other and we are still in that predicament. Here both things come together and this free republic outlined in the Constitution is still alive by a mere chance of history--the chance that this country has not been under the compulsion to build up a foreign policy, the existence of plenty, and of infinite social opportunities. If this once stops, the guarantee might be abolished by a mass movement which does not know what all this means. It was the greatest design we ever made to be politically free--but it was merely a design and to hold it up means to really understand what is involved. It is an ideal set--to accomplish a free republic of free men--and it cannot be entirely accomplished because it is en eternal task.

Once again this brings us back to the question of why every man must become a philosophical man, and here in relation to politics it becomes a reversal of the Platonic formula--instead of philosophers being kings or kings being philosophers, we have the proposition: every man a philosophical man. If he is not and is not always striving for that and to be free and to be trustworthy, the guarantee is otherwise not given. He has to make himself sure against any temptation to fall prey to any authority whatsoever; he has to make himself sure against the authority of a king, nobility, priests or God--and most of all against those substitute authorities in the nihilistic age which are much more dangerous and which try to tell us how to live and what to do by a higher authority that has become inhuman because God is gone. And this he can only do by becoming a philosophical man:--that means to be able to criticize any proposition made to him and to ask: What authority is speaking here? is it an authority or not?--and finally finding the authority in himself.

Can man be an authority? Can everybody be an authority? From where could he have gotten that idea of authority at all? From where could he have that abstract idea of authority? We must also ask along with this, because it is related to this question of authority: how could man have conceived of the idea of god at all? What was originally meant in Abraham's concept of God? And what gave God the claim of absolute authority? Abraham's original concept of God was that of the God-Creator, the Creator who was the beginner, the Creator who created the creation. This immediately brings in the question of authority because what does creation make the creator of what he creates? The supreme authority of it, of course. This is what sustains the claim of absolute authority and what originally entitled the Creator to claim that authority in the first place--He was the author of it. But since we assume here that the idea of God was conceived by man, we still must go back to ask: What made it possible for man to conceive of a God-Creator? What metaphysical reality in man's own life made it possible for him to get the idea of a beginner, a creator? And what metaphysical reality made it possible for him to get this idea of authority that is related to creation? It was possible for man to conceive of the idea of a creator because of his own human experience that he himself was an author, that he could originate things. Just that gave him the idea of authority and provided the real foundation for it.

When reflecting on an idea in a methodological line, we always try to find out how that idea was given to man and from where; we try to find out how man was able to make it and how it was possible for him to have such an idea at all. A believer would say this whole discussion is senseless, that man's ability of authorship is only eassible because God gave it to him, but if we do not use God as an argument, as we cannot, then it would seem that man could not conceive of the idea of authority without the hidden but original idea of his own authorship and from that he derives his idea of authority. We find too that while this also provides the foundation far the claim of the absolute authority of God, man himself can never claim absolute authority and that such a thing as absolute authority is impossible because man is a being of becoming. He can become a man or a woman, he can become a more and more creative creature who is capable of more and more authorship--but he is not that; he can only become that.

But this is the hardest proposition that man can put to himself--to make himself a man or woman, to make himself a real, whole free parson--and to say that the hardest task is to develop the I or the self, which all modern philosophies are concerned with, is sheer nonsense. This is all within the self-experience of man (I know that I exist as an I because you exist as an I); the real task is how to make that I or self into a he or she, into a human being of certain quality. As long as I am concerned about how to become myself (which is a psychological matter), I can never become anything. Unless I attack the metaphysical problem and solve that, I am not even entitled to talk about myself. Other people viill tell me what I might be; I will find out what kind of a human being I am becoming from other people.

And here we get rid of psychological philosophy--not psychology itself, which as a science has to be concerned with the individual and not the person (and it is easier to find out about the individual when he is sick)--which tried to make out of the I and the self, out of the individual (as it was tried from Kierkegaard to Sartre) an existential philosophy that made it a metaphysical task for an individual to become himself--which is the most nihilistic proposition that can be put forth. One cannot become something when he can never know what it is—and if one tries to, it means to go into an infinite demonic process of self-ruin. If man tackles the real metaphysical task, he discovers that only by not wanting to become himself, only by disregarding this and trying instead to become more and more of the quality of man, and living up to that quality in the highest degree possible, can he become himself. That is his metaphysical task--and the paradox of human development. To try "to become one's self" means for man to enter into an endless labyrinth full of mirrors in which he seems to be that or that or that. He engages in a mental process of self-reflection where all substance gets destroyed. It is the very process of self-destruction itself and as such a substance destroyer.

A psychological proposition taken as a metaphysical task--or rather taken as a pseudo-metaphysical one--is one of the most dangerous propositions of our age and if it becomes the cement of a kind of philosophical and theological reasoning (which has nothing to do with philosophy or theology) one result is modern theological writing which throws in theological and philosophical prepositions cemented together by psychological propositions. This is found in all the so-called theological writing from Barth to Maritain, including Jewish theologians like Buber. In all of them we see the same method of mixing up three different methods and lines of thinking--religious, scientific and philosophical--which here we are trying to keep pure. This is an age where any combination can be made—even artistic thinking with the use of beautiful figures of speech and metaphors (and which artistically might be very sensitive too) can be thrown into the mélange—to produce a book which is, as the Americans say, "very stimulating," but never constructive. Nothing can be proved--we can only feel fine until we need the next book to make us feel better. These writers never seem to ask why human beings are so wonderful--which they are--but even if they did, they could never prove it by a method of combined thinking glued together by psychological errors.

There is only one way to freedom and that is the way of pure philosophy because philosophical thinking is the only human thinking concerned with freedom and truth, and to become a philosophieal man is the only way to become a free man. When we reject authority, we have to accept authorship--the authorship of everyone and common. As soon as we respect ourselves mutually and have become those authors, taking responsibility for it in a community based upon a constitution built upon mutual agreement, then we can take a kind of relative authority within that state we have built, and we can delegate relative authority to our representatives—an authority which is controlled by a never-ceasing authorship of authority by ourselves. Metaphysically speaking, if man creates a government to which free men try to govern themselves, it could never be regarded as an absolute authority. If it were, it would have to be abolished because it would run against this constitution we are talking about. By establishing the metaphysical foundations for a constitution and by showing what it would mean to establish a free state not based on a higher authority like God but on the authorship of free men, we would have a safeguard that unfortunately we do not have in the American Constitution--which was designed to be such a constitution but was never metaphysically established.

We see then that a free state supposes that everyone is a free man, and since everyone can only become so by pure philosophy, could we then not reverse the formula of Plato that philosophers have to be kings and kings have to be philosophers to the proposition: everyone has to be a philosopher--and a king. This second condition--"and a king"'--we have to add because we have found that a philosopher can never claim any kind of authority (or to be any kind of an expert or authority) whatsoever--and, of course, a certain amount of delegated authority under the conditions we have proposed is necessary.

In science and art, for example, a certain authority has to be agreed upon (which derives also from authorship) and both rely upon certain skills (although they have to be accounted for) that require a certain basic respect. Philosophy on the other hand not only has to give up any claim to authority, but also any claim to respect because of skill—and philosophy requires perhaps the richest skill of all. Nevertheless, the philosopher can never claim respect for his skill, and has to reject it again and again at every new step he makes. In skill there is only contained a certain mechanical guarantee for the performance itself and since philosophical skill involves logic, it is particularly dangerous. Philosophical skill can become, and without the beholder or student being able to realize it, pure fake if it is exerted as a mere skill. In enabling the philosopher to proceed on merely logical lines, it makes it possible for him to reason against reason; it makes him able to turn around every statement of the other person in his very mouth by mere dialectical skill--splitting up terms and falsifying them by the mere process of reasoning itself. Therefore, it is a most dangerous skill and one that has always to be controlled as to its very performance--or it makes a man an empty faker or betrayer who loses his ability to convince and gains instead a tremendous ability to talk people into anything.

Reason itself by the skill it has developed (the skill of reasoning itself) can turn into reasoning against reason--which is an inherent danger of philosophical skill and has been used by all the positivistic nihilistic thinkers of our age. It can be used by philosophers of pure intentions, and has been used by philosophers of pure intentions, who thought that by the discovery of that quality within the performance of philosophical skill itself, substance could never be lost. But the more men got into that line of reasoning, the deeper they were caught. That was all the result of Hegel, who discovered it and started it with his mistake that the mere gift of reason was the highest gift of man.

Of all the schools of philosophical thought--the Medieval (scholastic), the Jewish (Talmudic), etc.--the Jesuit and Hegelian schools are the greatest schools of the skill of thnking created on earth and anyone who has to acquire the highest possible skill of reasoning--that is, anyone who is going into productive philosophy to become a philosopher who tries to make new discoveries of possible new ways of life--can do so in those two schools: the Jesuit and the Hegelian. But if he does not become aware of the fact that in the very process engaged in substance can finally be last, he will get lost himself and become an involuntary faker who interprets on into infinity. The real metaphysical thinker, the free philosopher, finds himself mostly in a situation where he considers himself lucky if he can separate a handful of hair into a few bunches, let alone split one hair into seven parts--which has been a charge so often made against philosophers. But there is a truth in this charge nevertheless. A philosopher can engage in an infinity of reasoning for the sake of the matter of the skill of reasoning itself and simple people have felt that--although unfortunately they also have mistaken infinity of reasoning, which can be the result if philosophy is mishandled, for philosophy itself.

So the philosopher must always guard against letting his skill lead him into that infinity of reasoning which in the end can become a kind of political demogogery with endless arguing and only the concern to be right. If a man wants to be right at any price and has a good pair of lungs and a tireless tongue, then it only depends on how long he keeps on reasoning. Such a man no longer is evaluating the statement or taking into account the fact that a contradiction does not necessarily show the statement wrong, but only that an opinion has not been conveyed exactly. He is not concerned with that, but only with showing that the contradiction makes the statement untrue--which means he merely is performing an empty skill. This is just the danger inherent in this highest skill that human thinking can acquire, and therefore, the philosopher has to forfeit any claim of authority and has to say: "I am the one who always wants to be checked on according to content so I will not fall into the error I am most likely to fall into--the error of a more logical performance without regard for content where I can go on reasoning endlessly. That means I can make no claim of authority, but must stick only to the claim of authorship--and to that only so far as I can show that I can author some thought valuable to you, only so long as I can show performances according, to substance and not an empty skill."

And with this we come back to Socrates. He was the first to conceive of the idea that the only possible way to author truth might be in a dialogue with another thinking person and he meant by that a philosopher could be sure he was really seekin g after truth only so long as he was after substance--and he could be sure he was after substance only so long as he could control it by going along with another thinking person: that is, as long as the other person understood, the philosopher could be sure he was talking about substance and that it was a matter of convincing and not just talking someone into something. Socrates always attempted when he tried to bring out the thoughts of his pupils--their own thoughts, which is the sense of the term "midwife" used by Socrates--also to show them what substance really meant: “Now let’s see what you have born here. Let’s see if it is not merely a wind-egg.” And then Socrates would proceed to dissolve the whole thing to show that it was empty, a mere logical statement that did not pertain to any matter of thought. He was the first to discover this trap--without knowing about the real dialectics (logical dialectics) which can bring the philosopher and the so-called philosophizing man into a circular movement of pure reasoning itself which can lead nowhere but into pure reasoning and is again a demonical process.

The original choice of man is either to become a man or to become demonic; man can become a human being or man can become a demon--that is his real choice. And of all men the one who is in the greatest danger to fall into the trap of demonic reasoning is the creative philosopher—just that man who moves in the very center of creative thinking which enables a man to become a creative human being or a demon. (There is no question of the diabolical here with all its indications of the terrific pride of man who can sin against God and risk eternal damnation; there is no question of the still human qualities involved in the diabolical.). That means the creative philosopher has to be the one who is most aware of the danger and that he is the one who has to pay the price of always leaving himself absolutely open. He is not entitled to play his cards in this hand; he has to play them open on the table--otherwise he himself cannot be sure. Therefore, he last of all can claim authority--and yet up to 1800 the philosopher claimed the highest kind of authority. It is small wonder then that he has become, though involuntarily so, the creator of the nihilistic trend of modern philosophy with its reasoning against reason--where (after Kant) philosophy itself for the first time fell completely into that trap end became a performance of infinite reasoning.

So here the ends meet again. That holds true for the possibilities and dangers of a single human mind also holds true for the human mind represented in the central part by philosophy (which too fell into that trap). But if the dangers are there for philosophy, the possibilities are there too--which means specifically for philosophy the possibility to come to a concept of pure philosophy and the possibility to find out at last what philosophy really is. Jaspers tells us that the philosopher is characterized by the very definition he gives of philosophy. And here Jaspers is right and not right. There have been so many definitions because of so many attempts to give a definition when philosophy was struggling to come into its own, but the moment philosophy was freed from the other creative abilities of man (freed in the sense of the conglomerate and the intermixture that existed up to 1800) a definition became more and more possible and it became more and more possible to perceive of philosophy in its pure form. That means that the attempt of Kant is still the point of absolute revolution and departure in philosophy. For the first time with Kant philosophy tried to find out what it was and for the first time became critical of itself—no longer taking itself for granted but raising instead the question: What is philosophy?

Kant felt that we did not yet know what metaphysics was and that we could not yet account for its foundations (and he tried—but did not succeed—to give those foundations)—but he did more with his criticism: he destroyed heavenly authority. It is quite true that by destroying heavenly authority he made it possible for those who fell back into authority to claim it even more so and to become even bigger (and much more dangerous) authorities; but it is equally true that without Kant no further steps in critical philosophy would have been possible either. So since Kant, on the one hand we had had, especially with the positivistic philosophers, steps in sheer reasoning where mere ideas have been taken as authority, but on the other hand with pure philosophy (which also became possible with Kant) we now have the possibility to go to the very source of the idea of authority itself (which we have found was authorship) and to find that authority cannot be absolute. Real philosophy leads only to the relative authorship of free human beings—who by being creative and by being related to each other gain the possibility of a relative authorship of authority providing they do not want to change it by this into absolute authority to be used as a power over other human beings. The only absolute remaining then is the absolute of human intention in human beings with a transcendental relationship to the Absolute (that unknown Absolute that is eternal, not infinite, and which we must always keep in mind just because it is unknown and can never be known to the full--not only because the limits of human reason are reached just there but also to insure man's possibility of transcendence).

The conclusion from there on is this "must" that I have already established: Man must philosophize; he must philosophize, or so I think, because it is only with free philosophy that man can gain the sense of his freedom--and without this man cannot be man; man must philosophize because without free philosophy he cannot make sure of himself, thereby becoming a human being, becoming more creative and more reliable for other human beings--and without man's being reliable to absolute purposes, he cannot build a conmunity but will fall into anarchy; man must philosophize because philosophy is the beginning of life (as distinguished from existence) with the transformation of given existence into a real life related to the Absolute--and only by a relation to the Absolute can it become life.

The Absolute has been conceived of as God, but the crucial question is not so much a question as to how the Absolute is conceived of as a question of whether man's relation to the Absolute is there--for only then does man have the possibility of transforming existence into life, of becoming men, of becoming a free whole person with the capability of transforming the given into something with meaning. Since man's former relation to God, metaphysically speaking, was a relation to the Absolute, man had that possibility in religion (though in a rather restricted way), but the minute God was gone he put into Hia place a false absolute: society, nature, history. Now to fix such an idea, to make it absolute authority means--since the Absolute as eternal is timeless and a false absolute with (its absolute authority is only infinite--to replace a concept of eternity with just an idea in time and it means to break absolutely man's relation to the Absolute and with it his possibility to transform existence into life and his possibility of transcendence. He no longer has to overcome himself, but only to subjugate hi-self to a higher authority--which means an absolute loss of freedom.

Now that religion is gone, man has only the possibility of going in one of two directions: either in the one of becoming more and more of a human being or in the other one of becoming demonical. The demonical lies in the way of an infinite direction in time because every infinite movement will always turn out to be circular (and thus dereonical) --which means for man the way of infinite reasoning and the possibility of man to destroy himself as a human being. The first basic task of philosophy and the philosopher is just to make man aware of this danger and to help him avoid falling into that trap by waking him metaphysically aware when such a trap opens: that means to make him able to become aware whenever the line of an absolute idea is being proposed that can only lead to an infinite movement of slavery. The second task of philosophy is to lead man on to the only other way that is possible for him now: the way where he can develop substance of his own, where he can become more and more free--always in relation to the possibility of the Absolute and eternity. To keep man in this relation—as far as it can be done--is the positive task of philosophy.

So once again the "must" I put forward is there: man must philosophize because without philosophy--unless he goes back to religion (which is a very tough proposition indeed, as we have seen) where he has a relation to the Absolute and at least a restricted relationship to freedom--he is in danger of losing the creative ideas and principles that can make him a free man. Only by becoming a philosophical man can he establish and keep a relation to the one thing that can help him to become more and more of a human being: that unknown Absolute that becomes more and more known with each new step man gains toward it, but never knowable to the full; that unknown Absolute that man must never cease to think of as an absolute toward which he can always move—giving him the possibility to become more end more creative and the possibilty to establish more and more all those eternal principles (freedom, truth, justice, beauty)—but can never get entirely hold of.

Lecture XI*

*(Note: The following is an excerpt taken from class discussion since the entire lecture period was spent in discussion.)

One of the great difficulties for the philosopher in formulating a concept--and especially in certain languages that do not seem to be as well designed for philosophical concepts as others (for example, two of the best languages for philosophy are Greek end German)--is to find words that can be redesigned to carry a certain meaning or distinction he wants to make. To indicate a qualitative difference in the meaning of power, for example, there is one word we could use to make the distinction: might. Might could be used to mean power only intended to be creative, inherent in which is the fact that it will not be misused. Might also can mean "I might do that."--implying possibility and also the capability of a human being to do something. Might also can he used--in a sense combining both meanings here--to describe God: The All-Mighty. So we seem to have a word in hand that can really carry the meaning implied when we say power can be used as a means for might, but when power is used as an end in itself, we have fallen out of might.

A word can be loaded with many meanings: first, as a symbol which stands for that thing; second as a metaphor--which mean that a word in the form of its letters has also to be pictorial in a way (take the word “chair” for example: the curve has been imitated metaphorically to give an image of the thing and to give meaning to be received sensuously--as a poet can use it); and third, the intention, which goes together with the other meanings of the word, that this thing shall be such and such (understanding) . All this goes into the creation of a single word. As myth was a conglomerate which tried to get all implications at once into one thought, one picture, so it also happened in language.

When we go about philosophically to dissolve myth, the task is to bring out of the conglomerate a working planetary system, so to speak, of all the human creative abilities of men that went into the myth and one of the means we have for this is the redesigning of concepts—and thus of words. To redesign a concept means also to put a different meaning into a word and to agree upon it for a better understanding of that word. This shows then that we are thinking directly as to the matter at hand and not as to the word. In the long development of language, bound to our living in myth and religion, we used to think that the word itself was holy, not merely the carrier of meanin—but words must be our servants not our masters. That means for the philosopher, when he sometimes is almost at a loss to find an available word to carry a certain meaning in philosophy, that he is able to create a combined word or to take a word with little meaning and by filling it with meaning redesign it.

Heidegger in trying to overcome the nihilistic predicament found himself in a situation of trying to show a certain position that the nihilists had not taken into account. To help him do this, he tried two ways: he dived back into Medieval German, fumbling around to find a word to fit his meaning, and he also took upon himself the task of re-discovering archaic Greek meaning. His rediscovery of the original “physis” (of both the pre-Socratic and the post-Socratic meanings) gave me the possibility to use “physis” for the distinction I make as to the physical and metaphysical. Heidegger uses it merely for something emerging into existence, coming just now—using it for a mystical event. To find a word to carry the meaning of the mystical event he was after, having experienced that it happens in existence, he had to go back to archaic Greek for a word to carry his meaning—and I follow in his footsteps here.

Sometimes a thinker comes into such a situation, having only substance in mind, when he does not want to be irritated by words that carry other implications with them—because by using a particular word he can be brought into another line of inquiry by the word itself. Words are also able to conduct our thought and if they could not, tradition could never be established. Take the Jewish people—what a wonder that a people could endure in a similar direction for over 3000 years. It is one of the greatest historical phenomena and one that we now have the possibility to look into and to find out how it was possible. One very great clue to this is the fact that the Jewish people have also been a people who established absolute faith in the word and created a tradition of interpreting the word. To be able to conduct thought by words, and by that to be able to create tradition by handing over to the following generation almost the exact meaning of those thoughts crystallized in those words, is man’s most powerful means of education. We start first by aping words, and then by following tradition, listening to what is told to us. Before we can learn to redesign meaning, we have first to take over meaning—which would not be possible wihtout the power of words to transmit meaning and tradition. The word is just so powerful because it always has implications of meaning that can be interpreted indefinitely—and there is certainly nothing wrong with this, but there is always the danger that they all will become empty words eventually if we stop the process of designing words in the philosophical sense.

Since Kant we have done just this—with no basic redesigning of words being done until lately. When this happens tradition then becomes usage and the word gets more and more empty of meaning until just the symbol is left (then something like semantics becomes necessary and a new science is created). But while words cannot convey and transmit meaning unless they are being refilled by new meaning gained out of fresh human experiences, they still can rule by transmitting synbolic power as mere symbols, as mere patterns of thought; and since we move according to those patterns of thought, it boils down in the end to mere reflection of thought. The moment we feel we have no obligation to face problems of life and forget to think creatively, it means we think mechanically in mere patterns of thought and behavior. This is the process of the dying of thought of generations who have left the metaphysical and this is the process where thought dies together with language. This is not, as some people seem to think, because we print newspapers and language gets worse evryday—that is only an effect. There simply could not be so much empty writing produced if the language were not in a process of losing meaning and could not be handled mechanically.

To lose, as we have lost, our will to put new meaning into words (because we ourselves can experience and create new meanings) means to forsake the realm of meaning itself--the metaphysical--and it means as far as language is concerned, that language can serve us only to indicate merely physical things, becoming less and less intentional and more and more functional until it becomes so emptied of meaning it can be indicated by mere symbols and what we call cliches. We can--since language is both a means of communication and understanding—communicate our opiniong (though not make others understand them) very easily by using symbols that we handle as apparatus and can finally even replace them with mathematical formulas (which has been done by semantics and symbolic logic). This is a valid use of language when used for scientific purposes, but the moment it is used for philosophical purposes it means never to use language or words for any transmitting of meaning or any forming of common will—or in other words never to use language for the purpose of understanding.

To use language only got the purpose of the physical, so to speak, means also to deprive ourselves of one of the most important meanings carried in words: the metaphorical content—which can only be brought to mind by poetry. Certain words through poetry can carry such an association of experiences that they never become entirely empty. Poetry can load a word like “evening” with such metaphorical content that it will even carry over into “Good Evening.” But without poetry and the richness of meaning it can bring, words can become mere cliches and language so empty that initials serve us as words—as in the long line of agencies and organizations designated simply by letters (AAA, AMA, NATO, etc.). The meaning of the words has been emptied out to such a point that they are not even symbols any more—they are almost signals. This is a sad commentary because language is the mainstay of creative thought.

Along this line of inquiry, we cannot help but wonder why certain languages seem to retain more meaning than others. Why, for example, does the French language have the least amount of cliches—in spite of the fact that this language coming firectly from the Latin was designed as the most exacting prose language possible? This is due simply to the fact that the French love their language so much and have taken such good care of it, so to speak. Ever since Richelieu, for instance, at certain intervals a new dictionary of the French language has been put out in which the greatest scholars have tried to go deeper into the meaning of each word; for decades past now in one of their newspapers there has even been a half-weekly column on the purity of the French language where every fault, every vulgar expression has been criticized; the French school system has been designed so that any fault in language is a major fault—and certainly, I could not afford to give in France a lecture in French, such as I do here in English (which I can do because I can think in English). To a Frenchman even for a foreigner to speak the language grammatically is not enough: the pronunciation is most important too. Any any one who tried to give a lecture in French without meeting those requirements simply would be listened to because it would be the same as Chinese to the French. They just cannot stand to have their language spoken incorrectly. It may mean that the Frenchman hates foreigners in respect to that, but it also means that by such feeling for their language, the French have managed to keep the French words from being emptied of meaning to such a degree as the English words, for example. By this discipline they have put brakes on this process of degradation and decay of their language and it shows how much can be done by mere negative criticism by a people who love their language almost above everything else.

But for the purpose of the actual recreation of a language (which is possible) even this slowing down of the process is not enough; the whole process itself of languages becoming more and more mere patterns of thought, more and more emptied of meaning has to be stopped first—and stopped at its source: man himself who creates language and man himself who by losing contact with the metaphysical loses also his capability of creating---and by the means of fresh human experience, recreating—meaning in language. Language as a creation of man can hardly have more than man himself can put into it. Thus we are brought back once again to the central position of philosophy and the "must" I have proposed. Through philosophy--and only through philosophy whch is the only creative human performance that can do this--can we start the procedure of redesigning words and changing patterns of thought into meaning by being able to to create new meaning in our own lives. Then by and by we would start to speak language as a language and not just empty words.


© 2009 Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504